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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE PRESENCE 



BY 



JAMES M. CAMPBELL, D.D. 

Author of <'Paul the Mystic," *<The Heart of the Gospel,' 
<'The Indwelling Christ," etc. 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



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Copyright, 191 1, by 
EATON & MAINS 



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CONTENTS 
INTRODUCTORY 

PAGE 

1. The Presence the Reality of Realities ii 

2. The Ultimate Object of Human Thought ii 

3. The Underlying Fact in the Religious Life 12 

4. Three Things Demanded of the Presence: (i) He 

must be knowable. (2) He must be accessible. 
(3) He must be usable 12 

PART I 

THE PRESENCE VEILED 

I. The Presence in Nature 19 

II. The Presence in the World 25 

III. The Presence in the Soul of Man 27 

PART II 

THE PRESENCE LIMITED AND LOCALIZED; OR, 
THE PRESENCE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 

I. The Presence in the Garden 35 

II. The Development of the Doctrine of the 

Presence s .- 36 

III. The Blessedness of the Piv^^ence 39 

IV. The Presence Localized 40 

V. The Presence Not Always Realized 43 

VI. The Presence Mediated by Elect Souls 45 

VII. The Presence Mediated by Angels 51 

VIII. The Manifestations of the Presence Essentially 

the Same as Now 53 

3 



4 CONTENTS 

PART III 

THE PRESENCE VISUALIZED AND PERSONAL- 
IZED; OR, THE PRESENCE IN THE INCAR- 
NATION 

PAGE 

I. A New Atmosphere 59 

II, The Temporary Outshowing of the Eternal. . . 60 

III. The Unseen Father Revealed in the Son 60 

IV. A Human God 61 

V. The Larger Incarnation of the Divine in the 

Human 65 

PART IV 

THE PRESENCE SPIRITUALIZED; OR, THE 
PRESENCE IN THE RISEN CHRIST 

I. The Emergence of the Piiesence 69 

II. The Continuity of the Presence 75 

III. The Transformation of the Presence 79 

IV. The Ascent and Descent of the Presence 82 

PART V 

THE PRESENCE UNIVERSALIZED; OR, THE 
PRESENCE IN THE HOLY SPIRIT 

I. The Universality of the Presence the Climax 

of Divine Self-Manifestation 89 

II. The Perpetuity of the Presence Involved in 

its Universality 95 

III. The Universal Presence is Necessarily a Spirit- 
ual Presence 98 

PART VI 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE PRESENCE IN THE 

NEW TESTAMENT 

I. The Immediacy of Christ's Return 105 

II. The Mistake of the Disciples 106 



CONTENTS 5 

PAGE 

III. The Mistake of the Critics io8 

IV. The Mistake of the Commentators 109 

V. The Meaning of the Terms Employed 113 

VI. The Attitude to be Maintained 117 

PART VII 

THE PRESENCE AS IT NOW IS 

I. The Inward Witness to the Presence 127 

II. The Outward Witness to the Presence 133 

III. The Presence in the Church: i. The Center of 
its Corporate Life. 2. In the Eucharist. 
3. At the Door of the Church 142 

PART VIII 

WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 

I. He Is Here to Save 163 

II. He Is Here to Heal 167 

III. He Is Here to Comfort 171 

IV. He Is Here to Strengthen and Transform. ... 174 
V. He Is Here to Judge 180 

VI. He Is Here to Reign 183 

PART IX 

LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 

I. The Recognition of the Presence 204 

II. The Practice of the Presence 209 

PART X 
THE PRESENCE UNVEILED 

I. At the End of the Present Age 219 

II. In the World to Come 223 , 



A FOREWORD 

An attempt has been made in the following pages 
to trace the doctrine of the Divine Presence in all 
its manifold unfoldings along the line of the ever- 
increasing revelation of God to the children of men. 
The fact of the Presence has been assumed, as has 
also the fact that God has never slackened his 
effort to make his presence known and felt. Break- 
ing through all earthly encasements, shining more 
and more unto the perfect day of spiritual vision, 
the Presence has culminated in the Parousia of 
Christ, in whose glorious radiance we now stand. 
It is therefore, something more than *^the vital 
immanence," for which the Modernists in the 
Roman Catholic Church so stoutly contend. It is 
also a redeeming immanence; being nothing less 
than Christ in the heart the hope of glory, and 
Christ in the world the hope of the triumph of truth 
and of the enthronement of righteousness. 

Our study of the Presence, thus, not only leads 
up to Christ, it terminates in him. It finds in him 
the Omega as well as the Alpha, the self-revelation 
of God to men. It makes the hope and glory of 
the future the manifestation of his hidden presence ; 
which is now, through the operation of the Holy 
Spirit, the object of Christian faith and the source 
of Christian experience. 

The conclusions reached upon disputed points 
7 



8 A FOREWORD 

are not set forth as final findings ; for to no truth- 
seeker is it ever given to discover all the truth upon 
any subject. As Paul has said, "We know in part, 
and we prophesy in part." At the same time, the 
brooding of years has deepened the conviction that 
along the lines herein marked out the thought of the 
future will undoubtedly run. And when the heart- 
moving truth, that the Presence that now fills the 
world is the presence of Christ, comes to be fully I 

realized, a cold and discouraged Church will cease 
to warm herself at the flickering fire of a millennial 
hope, for the millennium itself will be already here. 



Thy face I cannot see, 

Thy voice I do not hear, 
No form appears to me; 

Yet Thou art near. 

I feel Thee all around 

In love enfolding me; 
O mystery profound, 

I live in Thee! 

— A. Irvine Innes. 



INTRODUCTORY 

Regarding the All-Pervading, AU-Embracing 
Presence, three things may be postulated : 

1. He is the Reality of Realities — the reality 
behind all outward phenomena; informing them 
with energy and life, holding them in place, sustain- 
ing and directing them in all their operations. 
He is the ultimate fact and force in the universe. 
Behind him there is nothing. 

2. He is the Ultimate Object of Human 
Thought and Quest. The precocious boy who 
said to his father, "How do you know there is a 
God? I never bumped up against him," has only 
to wait long enough, and travel far enough, to 
find that at the end of his thinking and searching 
he will come up against him. From anyone who 
thinks things through he is inescapable. He is an 
intellectual necessity — the final resting-place of the 
spirit of man: he is greater than our philosophies. 
There is more of him than can be seen, more than 
can be said, more than can be known. He is the 
great *T Am," immutable as the sun in the midst 
of the shifting clouds. The cosmic process makes 
him known not as in a state of becoming, nor as 
coming into a state of self-realization, but as in a 
state of self-revelation. The world is not an evolu- 
tion of him, but of his thought and purpose. He is 
in all things as their originating cause and final 



12 INTRODUCTORY 

end. He is the blessed Perfection in whom all 
ideals are realized. Beyond him there is nothing. 

3. He is the Underlying Fact in the Reli- 
gious Life. The idea of the Presence is common 
to all religions. It is shot through and through 
them. Men of the most diverse faiths look upward 
and acknowledge a great Unseen Power by which 
all things are encompassed; a Universal Life in 
which all finite spirits "live and move and have their 
being." But the thought of a Universal Presence is 
so difficult to grasp and to retain ; it evaporates so 
readily into the thin air of intangibility, that the 
necessity is felt of breaking it down into small 
pieces, like bread at sacrament, in order that it may 
be handled, examined, and understood. Yet within 
the crudest forms in which the Supreme Being has 
been represented there has ever been a vague con- 
ception of something higher than self; and if an 
altar to this unknown God has not always been 
erected, men have at least felt the spell of his pres- 
ence. To make known this unknown God whom 
men often ignorantly worship is the chief end of all 
religious effort. 

4. Three Things Demanded of the Presence. 
In a satisfactory explanation of the Universal Pres- 
ence three things are demanded: 

(i) He must he knowable. And he can be know- 
able only on the assumption that he has made him- 
self known. This he has done. The whole universe 
is a continuous revelation of his presence and ac- 
tivity, an abiding symbol of his self-expression. This 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

truth is set forth by the apostle Paul in the words, 
"the invisible things of him since the creation of 
the world are clearly seen, being perceived through 
the things that are made, even his everlasting power 
and divinity" (Rom. i. 20). Law is the manifesta- 
tion of his mind, force the movement of his will. 
But the most complete transcript of the divine is 
found in the human. We rise from nature up to 
nature's God, and from man to the Great First 
Cause in whose image he has been made. Of 
course, in his totality God is unknowable. As the 
Eternal and the Infinite we can never know him. 
Yet some measure of his "everlasting power and 
divinity" is within our ken. That "which may be 
known of God," that which was necessary for man 
to know, has been revealed. That God is capable 
of making a revelation of himself, and man is 
capable of receiving it, renders the giving of it 
possible; that a revelation was necessary renders 
it certain. Now, it is universally admitted that 
for his highest well-being man needs to know some- 
thing definite about the Eternal Presence, with a 
sense of which he is touched. To be told that 
he is in the presence of "an infinite and eternal 
energy from which all things proceed," is not suffi- 
cient unto his soul's deepest needs. The question 
instinctively arises, "What is the character of that 
infinite and eternal energy in the presence of which 
I find myself? Is it a blind energy or is it an 
energy directed by intelligence? Is it an insentient 
energy, or is it a sentient energy endowed with 



14 INTRODUCTORY 

heart and will? Is it a physical energy or is it an 
ethical energy directed to ethical ends?" These 
are the questions which press upon the spirit of 
man; and the best religion is- the religion that can 
give to these questions the most satisfactory answer. 

(2) He must he accessible. It must be always 
possible to make connection with him and to hold 
communion with him. Divine accessibility is im- 
pHed in the very act of prayer. For if God be so 
far away that we cannot reach him, how can we 
pray to him? That men everywhere pray shows 
they believe that though infinitely distant, he is in- 
finitely near; that although out of sight, he is not 
out of reach ; that they may not only touch the hem 
of his garment, but may look up into his face as he 
is bending over them, and experience the peace and 
comfort of his brooding love. He is anxious to be 
known and to be acknowledged. His infinite heart 
needs an object upon which to lavish its love. His 
need of man is just as real as man's need of him. 
He yearns for our fellowship because the comple- 
tion of our life is in him, and the completion of his 
happiness is in us. All the outgoings of his activity 
have for their end the awakening within the breast 
of man a sense of kinship with himself, so that man 
may come to him as a child to a father, and in con- 
scious fellowship with him realize his true life. 

(3) He must he usable — a very present help in 
trouble, a source of blessing at all times. In order 
to be serviceable the Presence must be something 
more than an impersonal force, a subtle essence 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

pervading the universe — a pantheistic intangibility. 
In the pantheistic conception of the Presence as 
universally diffused the soul may be lost as in a 
shimmering golden mist; and yet it is from this 
view that we gain the idea of the divine immanence. 
Amiel is without doubt right in saying that if 
Christianity is to triumph over pantheism, it must 
absorb it, and not be absorbed by it. God must be 
conceived as in the world, and yet separate from it ; 
as immanent and yet transcendent. The idea of 
immanence brings the Presence near; the idea of 
transcendence makes the Presence personally real 
and practically available. A Presence sufficient to 
man's need must be a self-conscious being who 
knows and loves, who hears his children when they 
cry, who can comfort their hearts with the assur- 
ance of his personal interest and love, and who 
is free to give himself to them in answer to their 
utmost need. Rob the Presence of personality and 
it is removed from the sphere of human help. Only 
when the Universal Life becomes also the Univer- 
sal Love has the goal of human quest been found 
and the need of the human heart been met. And 
only then can the satisfied soul say of the Presence : 

Immortal Love, forever full, 

Forever flowing free, 
Forever shared, forever whole, 

A never-ebbing sea. 



PART I 
THE PRESENCE VEILED 



17 



THE PRESENCE VEILED 
I. The Presence in Nature 

The natural world is full of God. It palpitates 
with his vital energy. It is the temple in which he 
dwells, the garment in which he is clothed, the 
medium through which his being is unfolded. He 
is identified with nature not in the sense that he 
makes up the sum of its phenomena, but in the 
sense that he is its indwelling life. He is more than 
nature, as the musician is more than the instrument 
upon which he plays. Nature, as Chaucer quaintly 
phrases it, is "the vicar of the Almightie Lord," the 
manifestation of his immanent presence, the plastic 
clay in which his thoughts are shaped, the obedient 
servant through which he is working out the pur- 
poses of his eternal will. "What would a God be," 
asks Goethe, "who merely propelled the universe 
from without, and let the All revolve in a circle 
about his finger?" The idea of God as immanent, 
and hence as near, has become fixed in the modern 
mind. 

To the ancient Jew the thought of God as being 
far off was abhorrent. So simple and direct was 
his conception of God that he knew nothing of 
second causes. Where we say "nature," he said 
"God." In describing a volcanic eruption he said, 
"The hills melted like wax at the presence of Jeho- 

19 



20 THE PRESENCE 

vah." Describing an earthquake, he said, "The 
mountains did quake at his presence." To his un- 
sophisticated mind the thunder was Jehovah's voice, 
the sunshine his smile, the clouds his frown. When 
a shower fell upon the parched ground *'the heavens 
dropped rain at the presence of Jehovah." How 
very far from this childlike conception of the im- 
mediacy of God in nature have those fallen who 
in their wisdom see not God in the works of his 
hands! One of the saddest things in the literary 
life of to-day is the note of agnosticism struck by 
some of the younger English poets. John David- 
son, whose young life went out in darkness, wrote : 

Sunset and sunrise came, 

The seasons passed, the years went slowly by, 

But still the universe to me was dumb. 

And this from William Watson: 

Above the cloud, beneath the clod, 
The unknown God ! the unknown God ! 

Out of this agnosticism a spirit of pessimism is bom 
which blights all poetic aspiration. The great poets 
have always seen God in nature ; they have caught 
the far-off notes of a heavenly harmony into which 
all earth's discords will one day blend, and they have 
sung their divine hope into the hearts of men. To 
them 

Earth hath no dim and lonely spot 
That doth not in His sunshine share; 

and they have assured us that every earth-bom 
cloud is local and temporary, and shall one day melt 
away into the light of heaven. 



VEILED 21 

If to see nature's hidden harmony is to see God, 
this is a service which modern science is often un- 
consciously rendering. By recognizing the con- 
stant operation of a holding force in nature, In 
which all things are ensphered, and by which they 
are kept together, it is bringing men back to a reali- 
zation of the Divine Presence. It has ceased to 
attribute freakishness to nature, and has come to 
trust implicitly in the stability of her laws ; and 
while it professes to have no concern with anything 
beyond what it sees, it cannot help bearing witness 
to an abiding order and a wise adaptation of means 
to ends. It has become common to speak of nature 
as showing "the footprints of uncreated wisdom, 
and as working toward an intelligent end," but 
what the searchers into her secrets have been slow 
to discover and to acknowledge is that it is also 
working toward a moral end. Yet this is the only 
interpretation that gives sense to nature. 

To the conception of nature as always wise, some 
would add the conception that she is always good. 
But it must be admitted that she does not always 
seem to be good. Appearances are often against 
her in this respect. There are many things which 
on the surface appear to contradict the idea of 
divine universal goodness. In the best of minds 
there is a conflict between what is seen and what 
is believed. Perhaps no one has better described 
the conflict of a soul sorely baffled with nature's 
heart-vexing paradoxes than has Tennyson, in the 
lines. 



22 THE PRESENCE 

Who trusted God was love indeed, 
And love creation's final law, 
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw 

With ravine, shrieked against his creed. 

Nor has anyone better described the final triumph 
of faith than has the same poet, in the words, 

He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend, 
And through thick walls to apprehend 
A labor working to an end. 

The faith of a thinking man in divine goodness is 
always won and held by strenuous effort. Evi- 
dently God considered faith that is won by struggle 
as alone desirable, seeing he has made its possession 
so difficult. We look upon nature in her cruel and 
relentless moods; we see her make sport of our 
puny efforts to master her destructive forces, and 
we wonder that such things can be. To be told 
that "a God all softness would make a soft race of 
us" does not satisfy, for there are things infinitely 
worse than softness. There is no other way out 
than to walk by faith rather than by sight, and to 
believe that the final outcome of the struggle will 
be the triumph of the good. Nor does it satisfy 
to see in the welter of contending forces evidences 
of the reign of law. The final challenge of faith 
is not, "The God that answereth by law, let him be 
the God," but, "The God that answereth by love, 
let him be the God." In meeting faith's challenge 
God must do more than give an expression of his 
mind : he must also give an expression of his heart. 
He must show not only law and love, but love in 



VEILED 23 

law; love at the heart of law, governing its opera- 
tions and directing its ends. Of this vision, in 
which the divine intellect and heart are harmonized, 
Browning caught a glimpse when he wrote : 

I spoke as I saw: 
I repeat, as a man may of God's work — all's love, yet all's 
law. 

It is this belief that "the universe was cradled in 
love," that at the center of it is a heart of benefi- 
cence which cannot be satisfied with selfish ends, 
that is the foundation of all our trust in God. The 
Eternal Love, that in its craving for companion- 
ship created man, cannot cease to seek his highest 
welfare. For his benefit all things were planned; 
to the supply of his wants all things minister; na- 
ture waits upon him in a friendly, kindly way, not 
merely ministering to his physical necessities, but 
healing, comforting, and inspiring him — often pro- 
viding for him the medicine for a troubled mind. 
In this deeper ministry of nature is found her 
deeper message: 

One impulse from a vernal wood 

May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 

Than all the sages can. 

To many, this ministry of nature has come as a 
distinct religious experience, as in the case of 
Louisa M. Alcott, who says, *T remember running 
over the hills just at dawn one summer morning, 
and, pausing to rest in the silent woods, saw, 



24 THE PRESENCE 

through an arch of trees, the sim rise over the river, 
hill, and wide green meadows as I never saw it 
hefore. Something born of the lovely hour, a happy 
mood, and the unfolding aspirations of a child's 
soul brought me very near to God. A new and 
vital sense of his presence, tender and sustaining 
as a father's arms, came to me then, never to 
change through forty years of life's vicissitudes." 
Similar was the experience of Linnaeus, who, 
watching a blossom unfold its petals, exclaimed, ''I 
saw God in his glory passing near me, and bowed 
my head in worship." 

It is at once admitted that the experience of these 
prepared and gifted souls is exceptional. There are 
many to whom nature has no message of a brood- 
ing mother love, no vision of the divine glory. But 
may not the main reason for this be that the key 
has not been found which unlocks her deepest 
secret? The clearest, fullest light regarding the 
Presence in nature cannot be received until it has 
come to be identified with the presence of Christ. 
The relation of Christ to creation is implied in the 
words, "All things were made through him; and 
without him was not anything made that hath been 
made." Because he is in it, nature is the expres- 
sion not alone of creative energy, of infinite reason, 
and of divine good will, but also of redeeming pur- 
'pose. Its message is one of divine propitiousness. 
Its undertone is judgment against sin, its overtone 
mercy triumphing over judgment. Nature is the 
original version of the gospel of Christ. It is his 



VEILED 25 

handwriting that is seen in the heavens, his voice 
that is heard in the winds, his smile that is made 
visible in the flowers, his goodness that is seen in 
the harvests that reward the labor of the husband- 
man. The grace of nature is none other than the 
grace of the cross; the message of nature is none 
other than the evangel of redemption. 

Within the realm of Christian teaching nothing 
is more imperatively demanded in the present day 
than the translation of the doctrine of divine im- 
manence into the terms of Christian faith ; and the 
consequent identification of the Presence in nature 
with the presence of Christ as nature's Lord and 
Redeemer. 

II. The Presence in the World 
"God's in his heaven — all's right with the world !" 
says Browning. Rather let us say, "All's right 
with the world because God is in it." He is in the 
world as the sun and center of its life. It is his 
presence in it that keeps all things right. He is 
not enthroned on some distant Olympus, coming 
down upon it from without, and interfering occa- 
sionally with its affairs, but is here in the midst of 
its complex life, directing its movements and lead- 
ing it on to its destined goal. Blind is the soul who 
cannot trace the footprints of the Presence in his 
own life and in the manifold life of man. Alas! 
there are many such; many from whose sense- 
bound sight the most glorious fact concerning this 
world has been hidden. 



26 THE PRESENCE 

In a world like this — a world which is still in 
the making — it is difficult to keep faith in a loving 
Providence by which all things are controlled, and 
even more difficult to see that Providence at work 
and understand what it is seeking to accomplish. 
There are times in the lives of most men when they 
feel as Goethe did in the days of his innocent child- 
hood, when "heavenly love poured caressingly 
down upon him." But the skies change, and God 
wears a terrible aspect as seen through the murky 
clouds with which the sense of sin has enveloped 
the soul. There are times when there seems to be 
a pilot at the helm; but things change, and this 
storm-tossed world seems to be a derelict drifting 
in the ocean of space. Things happen that make 
us wonder whether God knows what he is doing 
with us or where he is taking us. In our perplexity 
we ask, why does he allow pain and sorrow to enter 
into our lives ? Is he impotent to help ? But many 
of the bruises we have received are not from him 
at all. They are the result of our blind stumbling ; 
and even while we are blaming him for them he 
may be working for their removal. And if we 
must needs bear them, he is seeking to sustain us 
by his grace and make them work out our highest 
good. 

One of the mistakes into which we are prone 
to fall is that of taking "visitations from the living 
God" for his abiding presence; with the result of 
connecting him with the unusual and shutting him 
out of the common. The most of life is common- 



VEILED 27 

place, but God is in it all. He is at the heart of it, 
the underlying ground of our common life, the con- 
troller of all its ordinary events. His creative spirit 
is everywhere at work in the world making all 
things new. The mighty ongoing forces which are 
working for righteousness are from him. He is 
actively immanent in the human race, at the springs 
of life, blending his activity with that of man, so 
that there is no cleavage between the natural and 
the supernatural. 

The goal is yet afar off, but, as Tennyson has 
said. 

If twenty summers are stored in the sunlight still, 
We are far from the noon of man, there is room for the 
race to grow. 

And, judging from the past, this world needs ample 
room to grow. Its moral progress is slow. The 
best things ripen late. Every victory for the right 
is won after many bloody battles. Looking at 
things as they are after several millenniums of his- 
tory, it takes strong faith to see the present dualis- 
tic moral order become monistic, and a world which 
had a spiritual origin, and lost its inheritance, be- 
come spiritual in its end. But with the Redeeming 
Presence active within it, this end cannot fail of 
ultimate attainment. 

HL The Presence in the Soul of Man 
God is not only above man and with man : he is 
in man. 



28 THE PRESENCE 

God is never so far off 

As even to be near, 
He is v^ithin, our spirit is 

The home he holds most dear. 

To think of him as by our side 

Is almost as untrue 
As to remove his throne beyond 

Those skies of starry blue. 

So all the while I thought myself 
Homeless, forlorn, and weary, 
Missing my joy, I walked the earth 
^ Myself God's sanctuary. 

Humanity is therefore a sacred place, seeing it is 
God's temple. *T revere the God who is within," 
exclaims Marcus Aurelius. In revering the God who 
is within let us also revere the place where the Most 
High deigns to dwell. In nothing else is the inher- 
ent glory of man so clearly revealed as in the fact 
that the human spirit is his special abode. "To have 
God within you with his celestial treasures is so 
glorious a thing that the glory, splendor, and glitter 
of the world cannot be compared to it. It is a 
thing so joyful that the whole world can neither 
take anything from it nor add anything to it, so 
great and high that the whole world can neither 
conceive it nor contain it" (John Amos Komen- 
sky). 

And since God is in the inner shrine of our being, 
since the heart of man is his true Shekinah, there 
he is to be found. We cry, "Lo here ! Lo there," 
when the kingdom of God is within us. Augustine, 



VEILED 29 

lamenting his long absence from God, exclaims, 
. 'Too late I loved thee, O thou Beauty of Ancient 
j Days ; behold, thou wert within, and I without, and 
there I sought thee — thou wert with me and I 
was not with thee." "My wish," says Kelper, "is 
I that I may perceive the God whom I find every- 
where in the external world, in like manner within 
and inside me." Coleridge, turning at last from 
his pipe dreams, and from all outward forms of 
truth, to the inner light, says in his "Ode to Dejec- 
tion": 

It were a vain endeavor, 
Though I should gaze for ever 

On that green light that lingers in the West; 
I may not hope from outward forms to win 
The passion and the life whose fountains are within. 

A Still clearer note from one to whom the immedi- 
acy of the Presence in the soul had become real, is 
struck in the Hues, 

I searched for God with heart throbs of despair, 
I 'Neath ocean's bed, above the vaulted sky, 
At last I searched myself, my inmost self. 
And found him there. 

The Presence being within us, we do not require 
to pray for it, or to call up as one might call up 
a distant friend by telephone. What we are to do 
is to recognize it, and to acknowledge it, if pos- 
sible; but should it elude us, we are still to be- 
lieve in it. Just because its operations are, as a 
rule, not distinguishable from the ordinary processes 
of mind they may go on without observation. But 



30 THE PRESENCE 

in this faith we are ever to stand — that the Pres- 
ence is always working in the secret recesses of 
man's moral being, in the place where thought, and 
desire, and choice are born, seeking to influence 
him for good; that his influence is the voluntary 
outbreathing of a living being, the conscious efflu- 
ence of a loving heart pouring its energy into every 
faculty of the soul, sending its tides into the re- 
motest bay and creek of man's spiritual nature. 
The Presence is the atmosphere in which the soul 
breathes, the sunshine in which its graces grow. 
When it is realized there is summer in the soul. ^^ 

It therefore follows that we can detect the Pres- 
ence in the soul by every upward push which we 
experience — every yearning after a purer and bet- 
ter life, every awakening of altruistic impulse, every 
stirring of a passion for righteousness, every forth- 
putting of effort to redress wrong. All these are 
signs that God is at work within us, not in a me- 
chanical way, but in a vital and inspirational way, 
as the operation of spirit upon spirit, the inflow of 
personality into personality. And is not this in 
harmony with the law of moral influence? for, as 
J. Brierly remarks, "There is no way of right liv- 
ing in our soul's innermost center except by the 
overbrooding of a greater personality." 

If God be within, nothing stands between him 
and the soul. Through the moral nature itself he 
speaks. Conscience is his voice approving or re- 
proving — his authoritative voice saying, "This do 
and thou shalt live"; his guiding voice, saying. 



VEILED 31 

"This is the way; walk ye in it." His appeal is 
direct. It is the appeal of personality to person- 
ality; for, though God be the ultimate reality, he 
is not the only reality; the human consciousness 's 
as much a reality as the divine consciousness. God 
and man are two beings, not one. They are two 
beings between whom there is intercommunication, 
so that into the one the wealth of the other may be 
poured. 

There are a few exalted souls who in their high- 
est moods feel the throb of the heart of the Pres- 
ence, and who can say : 

He glows above 
With scarce an intervention ; presses close 
And palpitatingl}^ His soul o'er ours : 
We feel him. 

But with the vast multitude the sense of the Pres- 
ence is feeble, and the sound of his inward voice 
is scarcely heard at all. They have no distinct im- 
pression of God, no vivid consciousness of the mo- 
tions of his spirit within their souls, no experience 
of his transforming touch, no thrill of his vibrant 
energy. Yet God is never absent from them, never 
ceasing to work within them. He is the inexhausti- 
ble fountain at which their spirits may drink; the 
source of health, of holiness, and of happiness. To 
realize his presence is the beginning of the religious 
life. Thomas Erskine, of Linlathen, in a letter to 
a correspondent, wrote: 'T hope you know what 
it is to be sensible of the presence of God. Religion 
/ seems to me to consist in that." To have a clear 



32 THE PRESENCE 

vision of the Presence is to "dwell deeply." That 
soul has come into the inmost shrine of religious 
experience who can with Augustine say of the 
Presence, "Thou light of my heart, thou bread of 
my inmost soul, power that maketh fertile my mind, 
and the thought of my bosom." Or with a modern 
poet: 

Thou life within my life, than self more near, 
Thou veiled Presence infinitely clear, 
From all my nameless weariness I flee 
To find my center and my rest in thee. 

Take part with me against these doubts that rise, 
And seek to throne thee far in distant skies ! 
Take part with me against this self, that dares 
Assume the burden of these sins and cares. 

How can I call thee, who art always here? 
How can I praise thee, thou of all most dear? 
What may I give thee, save what thou hast given? 
And whom but thee have I in earth and heaven ? 

— Elisa Scudder. 



PART II 

THE PRESENCE LIMITED AND 
LOCALIZED; OR, THE PRES- 
ENCE IN THE OLD 

TESTAMENT 



33 



THE PRESENCE LIMITED AND LOCAL- 
IZED; OR, THE PRESENCE IN THE 
OLD TESTAMENT 

In the Old Testament the doctrine of the Pres- 
ence is progressively unfolded. It keeps pace with 
the spiritual development of the chosen people. It 
was given "in divers portions, and in divers man- 
ners," as they were able to bear it. 

I. The Presence in the Garden 

The opening chapter of Genesis gives us a pic- 
ture of man in his innocency living in the presence 
of Jehovah, then after his fall hiding himself from 
his presence among the trees of the garden ; and of 
God following and calling him back, as he* has been 
doing ever since. The substance of this beautiful 
parable is repeated in all religions, for they all agree 
in pointing back to a golden time of innocence, a time 
of simple nature worship, a time when, in the happy 
simplicity of spiritual childhood, man was intimate 
with his Maker, and was at home in his presence. 
But a change came; man sinned, and a sense of 
sin made him afraid of God, so that he trembled 
at his presence, and sought to escape from it. Not 
that God had changed, but the vision of him had 
changed. Seen through the colored medium of a 
guilty conscience, his presence became terrible. As 

35 



36 THE PRESENCE 

this feeling has grown among uncivilized people 
they have come to regard the spiritual powers of 
the universe as their enemies, and have lived in 
abject fear. Out of the effort to propitiate those 
alien unseen powers has come the whole system of 
priestcraft. Afraid to approach the Divine Being 
for himself, man has sought the aid of an intermedi- 
ary, some daysman who should put his hands upon 
both and bring them together. This priestly inter- 
vention has been sought because of the belief that 
the priest was a privileged party, who had the right 
of access into^ the Divine Presence, where he could 
intercede for others, and secure for them special 
favors. What a wide stretch of development lies 
between this conception of priestly mediation and 
the New Testament doctrine of the priesthood of 
believers, which represents the humblest Christian 
as having immediate access into the holy place, and 
offering for himself spiritual sacrifices acceptable 
to God through Jesus Christ! In that doctrine we 
have Paradise regained by the restoration of that 
communion with God which was lost in the garden 
of Eden. 

II. The Development of the Doctrine of the 
Presence 
The Old Testament is largely the record of a 
people who, with all their grievous faults, were so 
closely identified with Jehovah that they were 
called "the people of his presence." They had an 
unshakable conviction that Jehovah was with them 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED zi 

and for them. At first he was a tribal or national 
divinity, whose covenant was with his people, 
whose communications were to his people, and 
whose favor was upon his people. The idea of his 
personal relations with man grew very slowly; but 
it grew ; and in the later Old Testament writings 
it comes out with considerable clearness. In Jer. 
2'^. 23, for instance, the threefold question is asked, 
'*Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a 
God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret 
places so that I shall not see him? saith Jehovah. 
Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith Jehovah." 
And in Psa. 139. 7-12, a highly poetical and spiritual 
soul gives expression to the thought of God's omnip- 
otence, in the deathless words: 

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there : 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 

Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me. 

If I say, Surely the darkness shall overwhelm me, 

And the light about me shall be night; 

Even the darkness hideth not from thee, 

But the night shineth as the day 

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee. 

This, however, was not the prevailing note. Gen- 
erally Jehovah was represented as dwelling among 
his people, as pitching his tabernacle in their midst, 
and there making his abode ; as witness in the joy- 



38 THE PRESENCE 

ful acclaim, "Sing unto Jehovah; for he hath done 
excellent things : let this be known in all the earth. 
Cry aloud, and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion ; for 
great in the midst of thee is the Holy One of 
Israel" (Isa. 12. 5, 6). 

No greater evil could come to a Jew than to be 
"cut off from the presence of Jehovah" (Exod. 
13. 15) ; and no greater blessing could be his than 
being allowed to come into his presence. 

Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causeth to 

approach unto thee, 
That he may dwell in thy courts (Psa. 65. 4). 

It is an interesting fact that the idea of immortality 
sprang up among the Jews from the desire of abid- 
ing connection with God. So great was the boon 
of fellowship with him, to the devout Jew, that death 
was dreaded because it was supposed to cut him 
off from it. This deep longing after unbroken com- 
munion with God is voiced in the words. 

One thing have I asked of Jehovah, that will I seek after : 
That I may dwell in the house of Jehovah all the days of 

my life, 
To behold the beauty of Jehovah, 
And to inquire in his temple (Psa. 2"]. 4). 

It reaches a hope in the words. 

Surely goodness and loving-kindness shall follow me all the 

days of my life, 
And I shall dwell in the house of Jehovah forever 

(Psa. 23. 6). 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 39 

It reaches a certainty in the words : 

But as for me I know that my Redeemer liveth, 
And at last he will stand up upon the earth : 
And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, 
Then without my flesh shall I see God; 
Whom I, even I, shall see, on my side, 
And mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger 

(Job 19. 25-27). 

III. The Blessedness of the Presence 
The blessedness of the Presence is a theme upon 
.vhich Old Testament writers love to dwell. In the 
nidst of his desolation Job looked back to the 
happy time when God watched over him; the time, 
as he says: 

When the friendship of God was upon my tent, 

And when the Almighty was yet with me (Job 29. 2, 5). 

The subsequent loss of the feeling of the Presence 
was his overshadowing sorrow. To those who were 
compassed about with the Presence no harm could 
come. Of them it was said, "In the covert of thy 
presence wilt thou hide them" (Psa. 31. 20). Be- 
cause the Presence was friendly and protecting it 
was said of Zion, 

God is in the midst of her ; she shall not be moved ; 
God will help her, and that right early (Psa. 46. 5). 

But the Presence was not only with the afflicted 
soul in the dark valley ; he was also with the happy 
soul on the mountain top; so that he could say, 
"Thou hast made me full of gladness in thy pres- 
ence" (Acts 2. 28, marginal reading). 



40 THE PRESENCE 

But not to all is there blessedness in the Presence. 
What it will be depends on what man himself is. 
To the righteous it is a fire of approval, to the 
wicked a fire of destruction. "The upright shall 
dwell in thy presence" (Psa. 140. 13), but "the 
wicked perish at the presence of Jehovah" (Psa. 
68. 2). When Job was smitten with a conscious- 
ness of sin he exclaimed, "Therefore am I terrified 
at his presence : when I consider, I am afraid of him" 
(Job 23. 15) ; and when his guilty past rushed in 
upon his memory Jacob exclaimed, "I was afraid, 
and said, How dreadful is this place!" That he 
should have survived the sight of God filled him 
with wonder. "I have seen God," he said, "face 
to face, and my life is preserved." "To see God is 
death" had become a proverb; and to Moses was 
the warning given, "Thou shalt not see my face, 
for man shall not see me and live" ; yet, strange as 
the paradox may seem, there is a sense in which 
to see God is life. When a man is right before 
him, God becomes "the health of his countenance," 
the sun of his soul, the source of all his joy; so 
that he can exultingly say. 

Whom have I in heaven but thee? 

And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee 
(Psa. 73- 25). 

IV. The Presence Localized 

Because of the limitations of the human mind, 
the Presence has been localized. He has been 
spoken of as absent and present. He is said to be 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 41 

in certain places and not in others. Thus men have 
come to have sacred spots ; they have come to have 
temples and shrines, where they might go and meet 
with God. This localization, which is common to 
all primitive religions, was a prominent feature in 
the religion of the Jews. The tabernacle was to 
the Jews during their nomadic wilderness life the 
trysting place where God met with them. At the 
time when the tabernacle was being made Jehovah 
gave them the explicit promise, "There will I meet 
with thee." And when "the tent of meeting" was 
superseded by the stately and gorgeous temple, 
Jehovah was represented as "dwelling at Jerusa- 
lem." "Let us go to the house of the Lord which 
is at Jerusalem" was the salutation of one devout 
Jew to another. There they "presented themselves 
before Jehovah" ; there they found him ; for in the 
temple he was in the midst of his people — not at 
the outskirts of their life, but at the very heart of 
it. He did not deal with them from a distance, but 
spoke to them as one close at hand, and although, 
on their side, a veil stood between them and his 
awful glorious presence, from his all-searching eye 
they could not escape, and from the hand of his 
mercy they might hope to receive some token of 
favor. 

Everything in connection with the tabernacle and 
temple worship was a reminder of the presence of 
Jehovah. The ark of the covenant was an emblem 
of his presence; where the ark remained Jehovah 
remained, where the ark went he went, and wheu 



42 THE PRESENCE 

the ark was taken away his presence and favor were 
lost. Over the ark was the mercy seat, and over 
the mercy seat was the Shekinah — that luminous 
cloud which was in a very special sense the symbol 
of Jehovah's presence; and which is doubtless 
referred to in the promise, "There I will meet with 
thee, and I will commune with thee from above 
the mercy seat" (Exod. 25. 22). 

So ingrained did the idea of God coming down 
from heaven to meet them, and to commune with 
them, become, that it took many centuries of divine 
tuition to enable them to advance from the con- 
ception of a localized God to that of a universal 
Presence. Even Ezekiel, one of the later prophets, 
when he saw in vision a restored city, with a 
restored temple, of which it was said, ''The name 
of the city from that day shall be Jehovah-shammah, 
Jehovah is there" (Ezek. 48. 35), was not reason- 
ing that Jehovah would be there because he is every- 
where. He thought of him as being there in a 
partial and exclusive sense. It was the peculiar 
satisfaction of the Jew that he had a monopoly of 
the Divine Presence. He did not say as we do, 
"God is everywhere — here as well as there, there as 
well as here." He did not rise to the conception, 

Where'er we seek him he is found, 
And every place is hallowed ground. 

It is a far cry from a localized God to the uni- 
versal Spirit Presence to whom Jesus referred 
when be said to the woman of Samaria, "The hour 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 43 

Cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jeru- 
salem, shall ye worship the Father. . . . But 
the hour cometh, and now is, when the true wor- 
shiper shall worship the Father in spirit and truth. 
. . . God is a Spirit: and they that worship 
him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4. 
21-24). Even in this Christian age many fall 
into the Jewish error of thinking that God is 
in certain places more than in others, and of calling 
certain buildings God's houses to distinguish them 
from other houses which are not his. Such people 
are still in the kindergarten, and need to pass from 
the outward to the spiritual, from the local to the 
universal, so that wherever they are, they may be 
able to say, ''Surely Jehovah is in this place; . . . 
this is none other than the house of God, and this is 
the gate of heaven" (Gen. 28. 16, 17). 

V. The Presence Not Always Realized 
It must not be thought that the Presence was 
always vividly before the minds of the people of 
Israel. Many of them found it illusive and vanish- 
ing. Their perplexed condition is voiced in the 
words : 

Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; 
And backward, but I cannot perceive him : 
On the left hand,, when he doth work, but I cannot behold 

him; 
He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him. 
But he knoweth the way I take ; 
V/hen he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold 

(Job 23. 8-10). 



44 THE PRESENCE 

Sometimes, because it came at an unexpected time, 
and in an unexpected place, it was not realized ; and 
not until the vision had passed did the conscious- 
ness of a divine visitation dawn upon the mind, and 
the words of regret escape the lips, "Surely Jehovah 
was in this place, and I knew it not." To miss 
the Presence is a very common experience. For 
man to be with the Presence is a very different thing 
than for the Presence to be with man. Anyone can 
say, "When I am awake thou art still with me," but 
only one who has anointed eyes can say, "When I 
awake I am still with thee." The fact of the Pres- 
ence is one thing; the realization of the fact is 
quite another thing. Whether man realizes it or 
not, the Presence is ever with him; but what a 
difference it makes when the Presence is a con- 
scious reality, and he can say in the hour of his 
direst need, "Yes, though I walk through deep 
darkness, I will fear no evil : for thou art with me ; 
thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me" (Psa. 23. 4). 
The pious Jew felt that to get near to God, to 
come into his presence, he had to make an onward 
movement. He had to arise and go ; he had con- 
sciously to lift up his soul, voluntarily to open his 
soul, and by resolute and continuous effort keep 
the Lord before the eye of his mind. He knew 
the power of constant affirmation, and kept repeat- 
ing to himself such words as, "Thou art nigh me, 
O God." Such declarations as, "I have set the Lord 
always before me"; "Mine eyes are ever looking 
toward the Lord"; "Unto thee do I lift up mine 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 45 

eyes, O thou that dwellest in the heavens" ; "O ye 
house of Jacob, come ye, let us walk in the light 
of the Lord," show that he made Jehovah the object 
of his desire and hope, reaching out after him, lay- 
ing hold upon him, opening to him all the avenues 
of his soul, that he might enter into it, to illumine 
its darkness, comfort its sorrow, strengthen it in 
all its upward strugglings, and fill it with satisfying 
peace. 

VI. The Presence Mediated by Elect Souls 
The principal way in which the doctrine of the 
Presence was mediated to the people was through 
the agency of elect souls. While all the people 
believed that Jehovah was in their midst, compara- 
tively few dwelt "in the secret of his presence"; 
while all believed that he was on their side, com- 
paratively few had immediate experience of his help. 
It was the saving remnant, to whom he was con- 
sciously present, who kept alive the fire of faith; 
and it is the record of their experiences that very 
largely gives to the Old Testament its spiritual 
value. To these exalted souls, who were touched with 
a sense of the divine Presence, it was given to fore- 
shadow the work of the Christ as mediators 
between God and man. 

The first of these saintly men who emerges into 
view is Enoch, "the seventh from Adam." In the 
gray light of the world's dawn Enoch "walked with 
God." He not only recognized God's presence, but 
in his presence he constantly lived. Like Brother. 



46 THE PRESENCE 

Lawrence in the seventeenth century, he practiced 
the presence of God. He was God's friend and 
companion. His name, which means "the initiated," 
seems to indicate that he enjoyed intimate friendship 
with God. Dim and shadowy as his knowledge of 
God must necessarily have been, the vital thing in 
his experience was that God was real to him. It is 
said that by faith he walked with God for three 
hundred years, namely, from the time when some 
great spiritual change occurred in his life to the 
day of his death. During these years the shadows 
deepened, the world became more and more corrupt ; 
but, rising above his surroundings, he remained 
faithful to the end. He must have been almost, if 
not entirely, alone; yet such was the depth of his 
religious life that nothing could disturb it. Through 
all the hostile influences which he had to encounter 
he went on his way hand in hand with God, clinging 
closely to him, and endeavoring to keep step with 
Jiim. 

Farther on we come to Abraham, the founder of 
the Jewish race, and the fountain of the mono- 
theistic faith which the people coming from his loins 
have transmitted to the world. When living in 
Ur of the Chaldees, amid idolatrous surroundings, 
the call of God came to him in a dream of the night, 
bringing with it an immediate intuition of God's 
presence and a distinct revelation of his will. That 
call was to him a distinct, imperative voice, com- 
manding him to surrender the ties of friendship 
and separate himself from his idolatrous fellow 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 47 

countrymen, and go forth into the unknown led by 
the divine hand. It was instantly and unhesitatingly 
obeyed; but what it cost him to obey it who can 
compute? In all his subsequent journeyings Abra- 
ham never once believed himself to be deserted by 
the One whose voice he had followed, and where- 
ever his caravan halted and pitched their tents there 
he erected under the open sky a rude altar, calling 
upon the name of the Lord, the everlasting God. So 
intimate and tender was his relation to God that he 
was called "the "friend of God"; and among the 
Mohammedans simply, "the friend." This unique 
title shows that he had broken away completely 
from the polytheistic or pantheistic ideas connected 
with his earlier faith, and had come to look upon 
God as a living personal Being with whom he could 
hold communion. It was as the Friend of friends 
that God sought to cheer and comfort him, by say- 
ing, "Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield, and thy 
exceeding great reward" ; and it was as Friend that 
God said, when he had determined to destroy the 
cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, "Shall I hide from 
Abraham that which I do?" Between friends so 
intimate there could be no secrets, for "the secret 
of the Lord is with them that fear him." In the 
primitive and fragmentary records of the patriarchal 
age there is much that is uncertain, but upon Abra- 
ham's faith in the leading of the Unseen there rests 
no shadow of a doubt. By faith he obeyed. In 
many ways his faith was fortified, and especially 
by what he took for angelic appearances. To him 



48 THE PRESENCE 

the unseen realm was so near that he was not sur- 
prised to receive visitors from it. Whatever expla- 
nations be given of these wonder stories of an early- 
credulous age, the one thing that shines out with 
transcendent brightness is the fact that here was a 
man who knew God in an intimate, personal way, 
and obeyed his voice. And in him, as the possessor 
of this simple faith, have all the nations of the 
earth been blessed. 

Not to multiply instances, Moses may be cited as 
another of the elect souls who stood upon the sunlit 
heights and beheld the glory of the divine presence. 
In the sense of the Presence his life was steeped. 
Jehovah is reported as saying of him, "If there be 
a prophet among you, I Jehovah will make myself 
known unto him in a vision, I will speak unto 
him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, he 
is faithful in all mine house : with him will I speak 
mouth to mouth" (Num. 12. 6-8). The writer of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews gives as the keynote of his 
life that "he endured as seeing him who is invisible." 
That is to say, he endured all the seductive tempta- 
tions of Pharaoh's court, and all the hardships of 
his desert life, because he lived as seeing the invisible 
God. 

Forty years after the stern discipline of life had 
tamed the fiery impetuosity of his youth, the angel 
of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out 
of the midst of a bush, and commanded him to go 
down to Egypt for the deliverance of his kins-people. 
Humble and diffident, he shrank from the undertak- 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 49 

ing, until his fears were stilled by the divine assur- 
ance, ^'Certainly I will go with thee." In the midst 
of his arduous labors this precious Presence re- 
mained with him, investing him with wisdom and 
power for his appointed task. As he went out with 
his people through the pathless desert to the land 
of promise the Lord went before them "by daytime 
in a pillar of cloud, and in a pillar of fire by night." 
The way in which they went was the way along 
which Jehovah walked before them. When Mount 
Sinai was reached, Moses, in the presence of the 
people, ascended its cloud-encircled heights, and 
there remained shut in with God. As he descended, 
bearing in his hands the two precious tablets of 
stone on which were written the ten laws of the 
covenant, he wist not that his face shone. But as 

The glory of the Presence in the past 

The moment's need and succor doth outlast, 

so his face retained the afterglow of the light 
ineffable. Upon his return from the mount the 
pillar of cloud stood at the door of the tent of meet- 
ing. "And Jehovah spake unto Moses face to face, 
as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Exod. 33. 11). 
And he had great need of this special interview, 
for during his absence on the mount one of those 
violent reactions had taken place, not infrequent in 
religious history. The people had relapsed into 
idolatry; and at the instigation of Aaron, had made 
a golden calf, and had fallen down and worshiped it. 
]\Ioses was heartbroken. How could he proceed a 



so THE PRESENCE 

step farther with this "disobedient and gainsaying 
people"? Conscious of his utter inability to cope 
with the situation, he asked, "Whom wilt thou send 
with me?" Then came the answer, "My presence 
shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest" (Exod. 
33. 14). To which he replied, "If thy presence go 
not with me, carry us not up hence." What a 
promise! Facing an unknown way, wondering 
where it might lead, yet little dreaming how long 
and rough it would be, and what unexpected turn- 
ings it would take, his fears are calmed by the assur- 
ance of the rest-giving Presence. The rest promised 
was not rest from trial surely, but rest in trial. 
Through all the turbulent life stretching on before 
him, in which his patience would often be sorely 
tried and his spirit vexed and chafed, he was to find 
unfailing rest in the thought of the Eternal Pres- 
ence. Never was he to travel alone, never was he 
to bear his burden alone ; but ever by his side was 
to be his faithful Guide and Burden-Bearer. 

There is a story of an aged woman carrying a 
market basket, who got into a railroad car and when 
seated she still kept her heavy burden upon her arm. 
"Lay down your burden, ma'am," said the kindly 
voice of a workingman ; "the train will carry it and 
you." By ceasing to carry his own burden, and 
allowing the Lord to carry it for him, Moses found 
rest to his soul. The Presence thus led and sup- 
ported him all the way, until, coming to Nebo on the 
border of the promised land, he wended his way to 
its summit, at the call of God, and there died by the 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 51 

kiss of God, finding at length rest in toil changed 
to rest from toil. And when he died his life was 
summed up in the words of the sacred historian: 
"There hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like 
unto Moses, whom Jehovah knew face to face" 
(Deut. 34. 10). 

VII. The Presence Mediated by Angels 

Another way in which the Presence was mediated 
was by the ministry of angels, who generally 
appeared in human form. In the Jewish system God 
is often represented as communicating himself, not 
directly, but through the mediumship of heavenly 
messengers. When Moses pleaded for some token 
of Jehovah's guidance on the way from Egypt to 
Canaan, the promise was given, "Behold, I send an 
angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to 
bring thee into the place which I have prepared" 
(Exod. 23. 20). In a later writing, in which the 
doctrine of the Presence is more fully developed, 
when the same incident in the life of Moses is 
referred to, it is said, "In all their affliction he was 
afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them" 
(Isa. 63. 9). In "the angel of his presence," else- 
where called "the angel of Jehovah," "the angel of 
the covenant," and "the angel of redemption," the 
doctrine of a special providence reached its highest 
form among the Jews. Angels were God's messen- 
gers, or servants, through whom he spake, and by 
whom he directed human lives and shaped mun- 
dane affairs. Sometimes the angel of Jehovah's 



52 THE PRESENCE 

presence is distinguished from Jehovah himself, and 
at other times he seems to be identified with him; 
but in either case the idea that Jehovah is revealing 
himself mediately is preserved. The knowledge of 
God given by angels was necessarily relative, 
accommodative, and partial. It was an advanced 
step in a long process of educational development, 
but it was not final. It was an anticipatory revela- 
tion which' was as dawn before sunrise. In the full- 
ness of the time a complete revelation was to be 
given in which these Old Testament theophanies 
were to find their interpretation and fulfillment. 
Like all other outward manifestations of God, 
angelic visitations were few and brief. The divine 
visitant lingered for a few moments and disappeared 
from view. His coming was always a glad surprise, 
and was not designed to absorb attention but to fur- 
nish aid to faith and to incite desire for further and 
fuller acquaintance with the unseen God. But the 
chief value of those anthropomorphic revelations 
lay in this, that, rising by them from the particular 
to the universal, from the special to the general, 
from the outward to the inward, men might be led to 
see that the Eternal God has to do with the inner 
history of every moral being. The God with whom 
Enoch walked is by the side of every child of man ; 
the mysterious stranger who appeared to Abraham 
on the plains of Mamre stands before the door of 
every dwelling; the "I Am" who spake to Moses 
out of the burning bush makes every common bush 
aflame with his presence and vocal with his voice. 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 53 

To every soul he comes with some special message ; 
and while that message must necessarily be colored 
by special circumstances, and by the conditions of 
the age in which it is given, yet it is essentially the 
same to all — a message of love and mercy, of com- 
fort and of hope. 

VIIL The Manifestations of the Presence 

Essentially the Same as Now 
There is a very common impression that in- these 
early days God came closer to men than he does 
to-day; that when the race was in its spiritual 
infancy men enjoyed a nearness of approach to 
God which they have since lost. This is a mistake. 
God has always been equally near to man, and the 
knowledge of his presence has grown through the 
ages, rather than diminished. The simple, primitive 
forms in which the Presence was objectified in that 
far-away period constitute the alphabet of religion, 
and when reduced to their modern equivalents they 
show that the religious experience of men- in those 
days was not different from what it is now. When, 
for instance, we meet the declaration, "The Lord 
spake unto me," we are not to conclude that the 
Lord spake audibly, but that the message came 
through natural channels ; that is, through con- 
science, experience, and providence, just as it does 
to us. But in whatever way it came, it was recog- 
nized as from God. And so when we read that 
Jehovah appeared unto some one of the Old Testa- 
ment saints we are not to conclude that he always 



54 THE PRESENCE 

assumed a visible form; or that he came nearer 
to him than he does to his people in this twentieth 
century. The experience of these earlier days is 
evidently expressed in different terms from those 
which we now employ. The metaphorical language 
used is far removed from our literal and less poetic 
forms of speech, and it needs translation intO' our 
modern thought- forms to make it intelligible. 

That God should have been nearer tO' men in the 
Jewish dispensation than in the Christian, that men 
should have enjoyed a closer fellowship with him 
then than is now possible, does not comport with the 
principle of development which marks the whole of 
God's revelation to men. Yet many strangely cling 
to the idea that the former days were better than 
these, and deplore the passing away of a golden time 
in which they fancy men enjoyed more close contact 
with God than in these succeeding days, "when he 
immures himself in some one corner of a feeble, 
heart." Looking backward in this regretful way 
the good George Herbert thus addresses God : 

Sweet were the days when thou didst lodge with Lot, 
Struggle with Jacob, sit with Gideon, 
Advise with Abraham. 

To which false sentiment Dr. Thomas Arnold replies 
that it arises out of "a forgetfulness and misappre- 
hension of the privileges of Christians in their 
communion with the Holy Spirit"; and adds that 
through the Holy Spirit "God communes with men, 
not as a man talketh with his friend, but as Spirit 
holding discourse invisibly and incomprehensibly, 



LIMITED AND LOCALIZED 55 

but more effectually than by any outward address, 
with the spirit only of his creatures." But between 
the earlier outward forms of revelation and that 
final form to which Dr. Arnold refers, in which 
spirit communes with spirit; to wit, the Spirit of 
God with the spirit of man, there lies the entire 
process of historical revelation, in which God comes 
to man, not by proxy but in person, dealing with 
him not through intermediate agents, but through 
his Son ; superseding the mediatorship of angels by 
that of the one Mediator, Jesus Christ, by whom the 
gulf between God and man was bridged over, and 
through whom God could find man, and man could 
find God, so that everlasting union between them 
might be consummated. 



PART III 

THE PRESENCE VISUALIZED 

AND PERSONALIZED; OR, 

THE PRESENCE IN THE 

INCARNATION 



57 



THE PRESENCE VISUALIZED AND PER- 
SONALIZED; OR, THE PRESENCE 
IN THE INCARNATION 

I. A New Atmosphere 

When we pass from the Old Testament intO' the 
New we come into a different atmosphere. At first 
we are struck with the paucity of reference to the 
Presence. With the exception of the instance in 
which Jesus describes God as spirit, and the 
instance in which Paul speaks of him as the one ''in 
whom we live, and move, and have our being," it 
would be difficult to find a text in which the doctrine 
of the divine omnipresence is even implied. Why 
this sudden change ? Is it because there is a sudden 
break in the unity of revelation, and a totally new 
order has been introduced? Or is it because the 
doctrine of the Presence has taken on a new form? 
Plainly for the latter reason. 

The teaching of the New Testament gives to the 
Presence a new significance. It unfolds a new 
stage in the process of divine self-revelation. It 
shows that the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh 
was not an isolated event, but was related to all 
that went before ; that it was something anticipated, 
hoped for, longed for, prepared for; something 
which took place in harmony with other modes of 
divine self-revelation; something which took place 

59 



6o THE PRESENCE 

in "the fullness of the times," when everything was 
ripe ; something that constituted a climax or fulfill- 
ment, a time of flowering which had behind it a long 
process of growth. 

II. The Temporary Outshowing of the Eternal 

It also sets forth the Infinite as externalized in 
the finite, that he might be better known. God, 
who was always present in the world as its pervasive 
Hfe, objectified himself in bodily form that man 
might know him, and find him, and have access to 
him. The incarnation was the temporary outshow- 
ing of the Eternal, the tabernacling of God with 
man, the visible manifestation of the divine life in 
our own type, the revelation of God in the terms in 
which the fullest and completest expression of him- 
self was possible. It therefore marks the culmina- 
tion of an age-long process. Before Christ came, 
God had been working in the silent depths of man's 
being; only a few were conscious of his presence 
there, and felt the stirring of his Spirit ; the multi- 
tude knew him merely in an outward way. When 
Christ came the unseen God after whom they had 
been groping became visible ; the distant God became 
near; the unknown God became known. 

III. The Unseen Father Revealed in the Son 

Of old, Jacob had asked, "What is thy name?" 
No answer was then given ; but now the name has 
been disclosed. God is made known as Father. 
Jesus has taught us when we pray to say, "Our 



VISUALIZED AND PERSONALIZED 6i 

Father." To the heart-aching- question, ''Show us 
the Father and it sufficeth us," Jesus has made reply, 
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." The 
historical revelation was a revelation of the divine 
name, and ^the divine name was a revelation of the 
divine nature, and especially of the divine heart. It 
was the expression of God's essential and abiding 
relation to man; the disclosure of the secret hid 
from ages past, that the Universal Presence was the 
presence of the Universal Father. And it is in this 
revelation of divine Fatherhood which constitutes 
the distinctive contribution of Jesus to rehgion that 
is found the evangel of the new age. For "this is 
life eternal, that they should know thee the only true 
God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus 
Christ" (John 17. 3). 

IV. A Human God 

The incarnation thus shows the kind of God who 
is universally present. The heavenly Father is like 
Jesus. The spirit of Jesus is the spirit of divine 
Fatherhood made universal. The true conception 
of God is that of an infinite Christ. The God who 
is behind all things, and in whose presence men 
have ever found themselves, is one to whom we can 
attribute all the qualities that belong to Christ. He 
is a Christlike God, attractive and approachable. In 
the earthly life of Jesus Dr. Henry van Dyke rightly 
sees "the human life of God." Or, as Dr. Edward 
Caird has put it, in the incarnation we have "the 
realization of the divine ideal in humanity." Saint 



62 THE PRESENCE 

John's interpretation is, ''The Word became flesh, 
and tabernacled among us (and we beheld his glory, 
glory as of the only begotten from the Father) full 
of grace and truth" (John i. 14). The Eternal 
Word, who is the contemporary of every age, and 
of every soul in every age, became flesh that in, that 
revelation of himself he might be forever known. 
He is Immanuel, God with us, never again to be 
remote. He is God in revelation, just as the Holy 
Spirit is God in operation. His presence in the 
world had not merely the value of God ; it was the 
presence of God. In his humanity Deity was veiled. 
In him dwelt "all the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily." As a man he lived divinely, for he was 
divine. His humanity was a divine humanity. As 
the divine man he revealed a human God, a God 
who' is related to all men, a God who' is ever present 
to bless and to help his children. 

Ask any simple-minded Christian how he conceives 
of God, and he will tell you that the God in whom 
he confides as the God of his salvation is the God 
revealed to him in Jesus, as divinely and humanly 
tender, sympathetic, and merciful. The God in 
whom his soul has found its center of peace, and 
joy, and strength, is a God who looks upon him 
through human eyes, and reaches out to him a 
human hand — a God whose infinite heart is filled 
with human compassion. He is, in short, the Father 
whom Jesus has made known. The boy who 
exclaimed, 'T hate God, but I love Jesus," had 
unfortunately been taught to separate in his thought 



VISUALIZED AND PERSONALIZED 63 

God from Jesus. Rightly instructed, he would have 
loved God because he loved Jesus; he would have 
loved the invisible reality which he saw mirrored 
in the visible image, and through Him who presents 
to us the human side of God he would have found 
the way to the Father. 

A leper in Madagascar came hobbling along the 
road. The people shouted for him to get out of 
their way. A missionary, touched with pity, stopped, 
put his hand upon his shoulder and spoke a few 
kind words to him. The wretched man sobbed 
aloud, and turned away saying, "A human hath 
touched me." This is what the incarnation means ; 
it means that God has reached down a human hand 
and touched us ; and it means that the human hand 
of God by which we are touched is a hand of com- 
passion and of blessing. 

Any conception of God that leaves out his human- 
ness fails to satisfy. Occupying the standpoint of 
the artist, Burne-Jones declares : "I never doubt for 
a moment the real presence of God. I could never 
debate about it any more than I could argue about 
beauty, and the things I love." So far so well. But 
what of the nature of that Presence, with a sense 
of which the artistic soul is sometimes saturated 
and intoxicated? In what relation does it stand to 
men? Is it a personal Presence? Is it a fatherly 
Presence ? Poetry, philosophy, or science can never 
answer these questions. Only in Him who is "the 
image of the invisible God" is this satisfying revela- 
tion given. 



64 THE PRESENCE 

There is a story of an Eastern king who, when 
dying, announced that his son, who was unknown to 
his people, would succeed him ; and he asked before- 
hand their allegiance, which was readily given. 
What was their surprise, when he was introduced 
to them, to recognize in him one who had lived 
among them as their friend. So, when we go to 
the palace gate to meet our King we shall look up 
into his face and see our Friend. Our King, whom 
angels worship, is the lowly Jesus, who when on 
earth went about' continually doing good, who 
returned to the glory from whence he came, who 
is now with us, and who in his present relation to 
us expresses in his person all the elements of his 
divine humanity. 

The Presence enfleshed in Jesus ever abides with 
men. We have said that the incarnation was the 
temporary outflashing of what has ever been. It 
was more. It was also the temporary outflashing 
of what is ever to be. What Jesus was in the days 
of his flesh, God was, and is, and evermore shall be. 
As Gregory of Nyssa has said : "We all believe that 
the divine is in everything, pervading and embrac- 
ing it, and dwelling in it. Why then do men take 
oflfense at the dispensation of the mystery taught by 
the incarnation of God, who is not even now outside 
of mankind? If the form of the Divine Presence is 
not now the same, we are as much agreed that God 
is among us to-day as that he was in the world 
then." This changeless Presence is the Presence of 
Him who is the true brother-man, who is not 



VISUALIZED AND PERSONALIZED 65 

ashamed to acknowledge his kinship with us; the 
human-hearted Friend who accompanies us into the 
soHtudes of the spiritual life where the dearest 
earthly friend cannot enter ; the abiding Companion 
who is with us in the humiliation of defeat and in the 
elation of success, in the loneliness of unshared sor- 
row and in sweetness of love-shared joy ; the Eternal 
Lover of our souls, who'se love is our constant por- 
tion, and of whom we can say with Christina Ros- 
setti, '*0 Jesus ! better than thy gifts art thou thine 
only self to me." 

V. The Larger Incarnation of the Divine in 
THE Human 

Viewed thus, as the revelation of the immanent 
God, the incarnation becomes related to the larger 
incarnation of the divine in the human. It is the 
incoming of God into all humanity. Christ came 
into the common life of the world ; his life took its 
place in the cosmic process, every part of which is 
glorified because he is in it. All that he has put 
into our human life is a manifestation of God. In 
the love which he awakens, in the good which he 
produces, God is expressed. In every one whose 
heart he has touched, God is present. And while 
it is going beyond the truth to say that the larger 
incarnation is ''the expression of God through all 
humanity," it is within the truth to say that it is 
the expression of God through that part of humanity 
in which the Spirit of Christ has found a place. 



PART IV 

THE PRESENCE SPIRITUALIZED; 

OR, THE PRESENCE IN THE 

RISEN CHRIST 



67 



THE PRESENCE SPIRITUALIZED; 

OR, 

THE PRESENCE IN THE RISEN CHRIST 

I. The Emergence of the Presence 

The death of Jesus was the temporary obscuring 
of the Presence. When the awful fact that the 
Master with whom they had walked, and whom they 
worshiped, was really dead, was brought home to 
the disciples they were inconsolable. Upon him all 
their Messianic hopes had centered. They had 
hoped that it was he who should redeem Israel ; but 
now that dream was ended. In his grave their 
dearest hopes were buried. While they were mourn- 
ing over the tragedy of the cross their enemies were 
exulting, for they concluded that nothing more 
would be heard of that "dreamer." 

"So the Nazarene is dead," 
Caiaphas the high priest said. 
"His wonder-working deeds are o'er, 
He will trouble us no more. 
May blasphemers such as he 
Perish on the shameful tree. 
And our holy temple's law 
Be kept free from ev'ry flaw; 
For the temple must have sway 
Till heaven and earth shall pass away. 
So the Nazarene is dead," 
Caiaphas the high priest said. 
69 



70 THE PRESENCE 

"So the Nazarene is dead," 
In his palace Pilate said. 
"Good his words and just his life, 
But the priests, who stirred up strife, 
Said his followers would be 
From imperial Rome set free. 
Vain their plotting and their care ; 
All the yoke of Rome must bear — 
Rome that will forever stand 
Mighty Lord of every land. 
So the Nazarene is dead," 
In his palace Pilate said. 

To Caiaphas and Pilate the deach of Jesus was the 
happy riddance of a dangerous impostor ; to the dis- 
ciples it was the blotting out of the sun from the 
sky of their lives. It seems as if God himself was 
dead. 

But, recovering from the momentary eclipse of 
their faith, the disciples arose from the dust and put 
on their garments of joy. Incontestable evidence 
had come to them that the Nazarene was not dead, 
but that he had conquered death, that he was still 
alive, and that he had returned to his own. No need 
had they to try "to revive a fading image of the 
past," nor to engage in the fruitless task of warming 
their souls before the cold, gray ashes of an extin- 
guished hope, for the very Lord they knew and 
loved so well was with them in person. Into the 
experience of his presence, which has become the 
inheritance of all subsequent believers, they were 
the first to enter. That experience of faith-illu- 
mined souls is voiced in the triumphant lines : 



SPIRITUALIZED 71 

The temple now has passed away, 

Ended Rome's imperial day, 

But the Nazarene still lives ; 

Peace to myriad souls he gives; 

Lives in gentle words and deeds, 

In all that meets the spirit's needs; 

And the cross on which he died 

By his death is sanctified. 

Hosts in many lands acclaim 

The Crucified One by his name ; 

In their faithful hearts are seen 

The ever-living Nazarene. 

Priest and Pilate both have said 

That the Nazarene is dead, 

False their wisdom, false their lore — 

He liveth now and evermore. 

— William E. A. Axon. 

The faith of the disciples in the resurrection of 
Jesus was vital and operative. It transformed their 
lives and set their souls on fire with missionary zeal. 
For evidence of his resurrection they did not need 
to rely upon the testimony of others. They saw and 
believed. His reappearance afforded overwhelming 
evidence that he had not been lost to them by death. 
Before it every doubt melted away. And by every 
approach which he made to them during the interval 
that elapsed between his resurrection and ascension 
their faith in his actual presence was confirmed. 

In ways suited to their varied circumstances and 
needs he came to his disciples, making himself 
known to them, and ministering to them as he had 
always done. He came near to his sorrowing dis- 
ciples, pouring into their wounded hearts the balm 



72 THE PRESENCE 

of heavenly comfort. On the first Easter morning 
before an empty tomb stood a weeping" woman. The 
light of life had been blotted out by her blinding 
tears. That empty tomb formed a yawning gulf 
between her and her Beloved. It was a dead friend 
she had come to seek, and had her quest been suc- 
cessful, that would have been for her the darkest 
day that ever dawned. A wondrous Stranger, whom 
at first she did not recognize, was standing by her 
side; and as she turned to look at him he asked in 
sympathetic tones, "Woman, why weepest thou?" 
Impulsively she answered, "If thou hast taken him 
away, tell me where thou hast laid him." The 
stranger then, in accents which she knew so well, 
whispered her name — "Mary!" With palpitating 
heart she uttered the glad response, "Rabboni !" 
The disciple had found her master. A heaven of 
love and joy entered her heart. Now that he had 
been given back to her she felt that henceforth 
nothing could ever separate them, but that she was 
to be his, and he was to be hers, forever. 

He came to his discouraged disciples, opening for 
them a door of hope in the Valley of Achor. They 
were utterly discomfited, and felt that they had been 
following a forlorn hope. To two of their number 
he revealed himself, as he overtook them on the way 
to Emmaus. They opened their hearts to him, tell- 
ing how the hopes which they had fondly cherished 
regarding their dead leader had been blasted. At 
first their eyes were holden, and they did not know 
him ; but when the bandage fell, and they beheld his 



SPIRITUALIZED 73 

glory, their doubts vanished away as the mists of 
the morning before the rising sun, and the confident 
expectation was begotten within them that the king- 
dom which he had promised would yet be realized. 

He came near to his doubting disciples, dispelling 
by the certainty of his presence the leaden clouds 
which had darkened their skies. '*He was seen of 
James," his brother after the flesh, with whom he 
had a special interview. There are reasons why 
James should have been singled out. He had been 
shocked by his brother's pretensions. He had wished 
to believe in him, but could not. He loved his 
brother, and was bound to him by tender memories 
of childhood. When he saw others flocking to him 
he was heart-sick in his isolation. What passed in 
that interview between them we can never know. 
No hint has been dropped touching the convincing 
self-revealings on the one hand and the earnest 
questionings on the other ; but we know that all the 
doubts of James regarding the claims of Jesus were 
set at rest, and that henceforth, until the day of his 
martyrdom, he became his faithful follower. 

Another doubter to whom the Lord appeared was 
Thomas, who has been called the rationalist among 
the apostles. ''He was one of those incredulous 
spirits that must always feel the ground upon which 
they are to walk, and who dare make no leap over 
the pit which they have not first accurately meas- 
ured." From the first interview of Jesus with the 
apostles Thomas was designedly absent. He had 
lost hope. The testimony of the eleven, who told 



74 THE PRESENCE 

him that they had seen the Lord, he obstinately 
refused to believe ; and he boldly declared that noth- 
ing short of touching the crucifixion marks in the 
body of Jesus would convince him that he had really 
risen from the grave. The Master's treatment of 
his doubting disciple was touchingly tender. Ac- 
commodating himself to his weakness, he offered 
him the proof he sought, when instantly his doubts 
were silenced, and, ashamed of his former incredu- 
lity, he fell at his feet, making complete confession 
of him as the Master he served and the God he 
worshiped. 

He also came near to Peter, the penitent disciple. 
On his appearance to Mary he had said, *'Go and 
tell my disciples, and Peter, that I go before them 
into Galilee, and there shall I see them." Now he 
met the penitent alone, and restored him to himself 
before restoring him to his fellow disciples. The 
words of contrition on the one side, and of comfort- 
ing love on the other, that marked this private inter- 
view, have not been recorded. They were too sacred 
to be reported to others. But out of the interview 
came not only the healing of a bruised heart, but 
also the confirmation of a disciple's faith in his 
Lord's resurrection, which never afterward wavered. 

So to every sorrowing, discouraged, doubting, 
humbled heart the risen Lord still draws near. He 
thinks of each one ; singles him out, follows him into 
his place of solitude. He always takes the first step. 
He is anxious to soothe our sorrow, to cheer our 
spirits,' to dispel our doubts, to heal our wounded 



SPIRITUALIZED 75 

hearts. When we think of him as far away he is 
really near. At the very time we are mourning his 
absence he is at our side seeking to minister to us 
the blessing we need. 

II. The Continuity of the Presence 

Death made no gap, no broken link, in the con- 
tinuity of the real presence of Christ. He went 
through to the other side of death, and stood up in 
the new life of the spiritual realm into which he 
had entered. He died to live. Through death he 
entered, as we do, into a higher life. The signifi- 
cance of his resurrection, therefore, lies in this, that 
by it we have a living Christ. Bishop Westcott 
affirms that the apostolic conviction of the resur- 
rection is, "The Lord lives," rather than, ''The Lord 
was raised." Would it not be more correct to say 
that apostolic conviction of the resurrection is, ''The 
Lord lives, because he was raised"? If he was 
raised, he is alive ; and if he is alive, his people ought 
to know it, and to bask in the sunshine of his pres- 
ence. 

No writer of the New Testament ever speaks of 
Christ as dead. They all speak of him as having 
died, and as being alive. Think what that means ! 
It means that the Christ who dwelt for a time among 
men did not go away leaving only a fragrant mem- 
ory of his fleeting visit, but that he is as truly with 
us to-day as he was with men in the days of his 
flesh; that he is present at our weddings and 
funerals ; that to him we can bring our sick for heal- 



'](i THE PRESENCE 

ing; to him hunger-bitten and sin-burdened souls 
can still come for relief. 

It is told of Dr. R. W. Dale, that when early in 
his ministry he came to realize the great truth of 
the actual presence of the risen living Christ, his 
religious experience was revolutionized, and a new 
note of power entered into his preaching. His 
biographer, in recording this great crisis in his 
life, says : "He was writing an Easter sermon, and 
when half way through the thought of the risen 
Lord broke in upon him as it had never done before. 
To use his own words: 'Christ is alive!' I said to 
myself. 'Alive !' And then. I paused again. 'Alive ! 
can that really be true — living as really as I myself 
am?' I got up and walked about repeating, 'Christ 
is living! Christ is living!' At first it seemed 
strange and hardly true, but at last it came upon 
me as a burst of sudden glory. Yes, Christ is living ! 
It was to me a new discovery. I thought that all 
along I had believed it; but not until that moment 
did I feel sure of it. I then said : 'My people shall 
know. I shall preach about it again and again till 
they believe it as I do now.' " Ever afterward this 
great theme became the center of his preaching. His 
soul was saturated w^th it. That it gained increas- 
ing hold upon him is seen in his volume on "The 
Living Christ and the Four Gospels," which con- 
tains the latest and the ripest fruit of a singularly 
vital and productive ministry. 

One from whose eyes this vision was hid sorrow- 
fully exclaimed, "Whether Christ be risen or not, 



SPIRITUALIZED 77 

it is very certain that he is not here." There are 
those who know that he is risen, because they are 
very certain that he is here. His presence is to them 
the evidence of his resurrection. The resurrection 
has given to them a Hving Christ — a present Christ. 
This experience is in agreement with the declaration 
of Scripture that the Christ who died conquered 
death and dieth no more. "Death hath no more 
dominion over him." He himself declares, "I am 
. . . the Living One; and I became dead, and 
behold, I am alive unto the ages of the ages, and 
I have the keys of death and of Hades" (Rev. i. i8). 
It is this truth which gives vitality to faith. Chris- 
tian life is not nourished by the memory of a dead 
man, but by communion with the vanquisher of 
death. The Christian does not "live with a memory 
until it becomes a presence — an objective reality"; 
he lives with a living Redeemer, who is as real to 
him as his own existence. His faith is something 
more than "the miracle of reshaping the remembered 
object by the all-creative magic of love"; it is the 
miracle of seeing with a love-lit eye the presence of 
one who is actually near. The Christ who' so 
strangely stirs the heart and rules the life is not the 
creation of the imagination — an imaginative ideal 
which love has fashioned — but a living Presence, 
with whom the spirit of man can hold personal fel- 
lowship. He not only lived, he lives ; he has not 
only been here, he is here; he not only minis- 
tered to the children of men, he still ministers to 
them. 



78 THE PRESENCE 

Warm, sweet, tender, even yet 

A present help is He ; 
And faith hath still its Olivet, 

And love its Galilee. 

Christ is not receding into the past, his name and 
influence growing fainter as one generation succeeds 
another. He is living in the world to-day just as 
truly as when he walked among men in the garments 
of flesh. Yea, he is more alive than ever. His 
power has been multiplied a millionfold. Dying in 
weakness as a common son of man, he was "marked 
off as the Son of God in power, by his resurrection 
from the dead." 

Calling the church back tO' the simple faith which 
quickened the hearts and inspired the lives of the 
early disciples, Phillips Brooks exclaims: "A living 
Christ ! the old, ever new, ever blessed Easter truth ! 
He liveth. He was dead. He is alive f orevermore ! 
O that everything dead and formal might go out 
of our creed, out of our life, out of our heart 
to-day ! He is alive ! Do you believe it ? What 
are you dreary for, O mourner? What are you 
hesitating for, O worker? What are you fearing 
death for, O man? O, if we could only lift up our 
heads and live with him ; live new lives, high lives, 
lives of hope and love and holiness, to which death 
should be nothing but the breaking away of the last 
cloud, and the letting of the life out to its comple- 
tion." In the biography of this prophet of the Lord 
we find how much the truth of the living Christ 
meant to him. Writing to a friend, he said: "I 



SPIRITUALIZED 79 

cannot tell you how personal this grows to me. He 
is here. He knows me and I know him. It is no 
figure of speech. It is the realest thing in the 
world, and every day makes it realer. And one 
wonders with delight what it will grow to as the 
years go on." Happy those with whom this faith 
abides and grows. They go on from strength to 
strength, from glory to glory. 

III. The Transformation of the Presence 

It is said that after his resurrection Jesus was 
manifested to his disciples ''in another form." First, 
he was manifested to them in flesh, then in his 
spiritual body ; and after that he was manifested in 
still another form, namely, in spirit. "The form of 
the Son of God passes," remarks Canon Fremantle, 
*'and the spirit comes." Man is a spiritual being and 
needs a spiritual revelation. All external revela- 
tions are at best temporary and incomplete. The 
final revelation is not to the senses or throug-h the 
senses, but to the heart direct. The Word who 
became flesh and dwelt among us had to become 
spirit and dwell within us before his revelation was 
complete. Of this deeper revelation Paul testifies 
when, describing the crisis of his spiritual life, he 
says, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me." 
From that inner, personal revelation came the evi- 
dence of his call to the apostleship and the inspira- 
tion of his life of toil and sacrifice. 

A tendency to materialize the spiritual has always 
existed. Those who begin in the spirit often end 



8o THE PRESENCE 

in the flesh. Bishop Westcott declares that "as a 
matter of experience the popular conception of a 
carnal resurrection very speedily overpowered the 
teaching of the New Testament in the early church." 
To this error a large portion of the church continues 
to cling. The force of Paul's reasoning regarding 
the resurrection body, namely, that it is psychical 
rather than physical, that it is sown a natural body 
and raised a spiritual body, has not been felt as it 
ought to have been, especially as it relates to the 
post-resurrection body of Christ. The point that has 
been often missed is that a spiritual resurrection is 
not necessarily a bodiless resurrection. In answer- 
ing the question, "How are the dead raised, and 
with what manner of body do they come?" Paul 
distinctly states that they come with a spiritual 
body; for, says he, ''there is a natural body and 
there is a spiritual body." The body in which Christ 
ascended was a spiritual body, a body which pos- 
sessed qualities very different from a physical body, 
a body fitted for a spiritual existence. That body 
is now in heaven; but the spirit of Christ tran- 
scends his body, and is now here among men, living 
and active. 

Very naturally, out of the conception of a carnal 
resurrection has grown the conception of a carnal 
reappearance. But such a conception implies a 
going backward. It is obviously in accordance with 
the law of development that the second coming of 
Christ should be a spiritual coming. "That is not 
first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; 



SPIRITUALIZED 8i 

then that which is spiritual." That this is the prin- 
ciple of New Testament interpretation cannot for a 
moment be doubted. Hence the justice of the con- 
clusion : "He came at first into men's view by com- 
ing on the plane of the senses ; he came the second 
time into men's vision by lifting them up to his plane 
of spiritual comprehension." 

The resurrection of Christ thus takes its place in 
an ascending series of revelations. It shows that 
Christ has completely broken through the limita- 
tions of outward forms of manifestation. He is 
no longer localized. He is not in one place more 
than he is in another. The "Holy Land" is where 
he reveals himself to his disciples and walks with 
them. But in entering into the larger Hfe in the 
spiritual sphere he has taken over all the elements 
of power which he gathered within the limitations 
of his earth-Hfe. His present revelation to the soul 
is made more real and effective because of his 
former revelation in human form. With this power 
behind it, it gets a firmer hold upon human hearts 
and enters more fully into human lives, multiplying 
his power over men a thousandfold, and making 
it possible for them to possess him, and be pos- 
sessed by him, as never before. 

Because of the difficulty which the disciples felt 
in passing from the physical to the spiritual, Christ 
after his resurrection tarried on earth forty days, 
giving to them occasional revealings of his essen- 
tial spiritual nature, so that the transition in their 
thoughts from the crucified man to "the Lord of 



82 THE PRESENCE 

Glory" might not be so sudden as to be over- 
whelming. Only in this gradual way could the 
light of spiritual knowledge come to them. 

The resurrection of Christ marks the beginning 
of a new epoch, a new mode of divine self-mani- 
festation, a new stage in the development of the 
Presence. The historical and the outward are now 
behind. We build upon them, and out of them 
our present experience grows ; but we no longer look 
upon the divine as confined to any outward form. 
The outward has given place to the spiritual. This 
change is clearly implied in Paul's words, "Though 
we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we 
know him so no more." The resurrection has given 
to us a spiritual Christ, a Christ who has come to 
lift us into the light and glory of the spiritual realm 
in which he lives, and works, and reigns. 

IV. The Ascent and Descent of the Presence 

The excarnation of Christ, or his going out of 
the flesh, was completed in his going up into heaven. 
"I ascend," he said, "unto my Father and your 
Father, and my God and your God." "He ascended 
far above all heavens that he might fill all things" ; 
that is to say, he ascended out of the earth-life 
that he might take entire possession of human life, 
and of human lives, and thus become omnipotent 
in the spiritual world. He did not ascend that he 
might relinquish his redemptive work, but that he 
might prosecute it with greater energy, to wider 
success. 



SPIRITUALIZED 83 

The question which here arises is, where is Jesus 
Christ now? In what world does he dwell? In 
what sphere is he carrying on his benign mission? 
Have the heavens which received him given him 
back? Or is he still in heaven, and is the light 
in which we are to rejoice the light of his vanished 
presence ? The common view of the matter is that 
Christ died on the cross, was laid in the tomb, 
rose again from the dead, and went up in his resur- 
rection body to his native heaven, and that he will 
come again at the end of the world to judge the 
nations and assign to men their final destinies. He 
was here; he is gone; he will come again; but 
meanwhile he is absent from us. Another view is 
that while he is absent in person he is present repre- 
sentatively in the Holy Spirit. One day — how soon 
we know not — he will come again, and at his com- 
ing the millennium will begin. All will be right 
when he comes, but meanwhile things are to go 
from bad to worse. 

Neither of these views presents the New Testa- 
ment conception of things. They both agree at 
one point, namely, in representing Christ as still 
in heaven, and in operating from that center the 
forces of his spiritual kingdom. But both answers 
merely push back the inquiry a step further, by 
starting the new question. Where is heaven? God 
is in heaven and yet he is here; heaven is the 
habitation of his glory, yet he fills immensity with 
his presence. So Christ is in heaven and yet he 
is here. He is just as truly in London or New 



84 THE PRESENCE 

York to-day as he was in Jerusalem about nineteen 
hundred years ago. The heaven to which he 
ascended after his resurrection, the heaven which 
received him after he vanished from the sight of 
his perplexed disciples, is the upper sphere of the 
unseen world — the metropolis of the spiritual uni- 
verse. Where it is we know not; as to what it is 
like we have only such dim suggestions as gross 
material figures can convey. 

But why speak of heaven as "up" ? This question 
was once put to a Christian teacher, who thus 
repHed: "Certainly heaven is above the present 
world, higher by far; not up in space so much as 
up in the order of being; it is above the world on 
the same principle that you are above the mineral 
and vegetable worlds." This is the true way to 
think of it. Heaven is up in the order of nature, 
and to see it we must lift up our eyes from the 
things of time and turn them into a new direction. 
"To say that Jesus went up into heaven," remarks 
Sir William Ramsay, "is a merely symbolical refer- 
ence ; it has not a local significance ; it is an emble- 
matic statement of the truth. The truth which has 
to be conceived in the mind is that at the due stage 
and moment Jesus ceased to be apparent to human 
senses in the world, and is God with God." 

But wherever heaven is, it is clear that Jesus can 
be there and here at the same time. There his 
presence is embodied, here it is spiritually diffused ; 
there his glory shines forth in his glorified 
humanity, here it is hidden from the eyes of men. 



SPIRITUALIZED 85 

For the revelation of his presence we have tO' wait, 
rejoicing that he is yet to be known here as he 
is known there, when on the one side there is 
greater power of vision, and on the other side 
greater fullness of revelation. Meanwhile we 
rejoice that at this moment he is here. Bodily 
absent, he is spiritually present. He has been raised 
above all the limitations to which, for a time, he 
subjected himself. Breaking the bonds of the flesh 
he ascended above all the heavens that he might 
again descend to earth and become immanent in 
the life of the world, filling every part of it with 
the saving health of his presence. Augustine 
remarks that "in coming forth from God he has 
not left God, and in returning to God he has not 
left us." Perhaps it would be more correct to 
say that in returning to God he has left us out- 
wardly that he might return to us spiritually, to be 
forever by our side, as close in person as he is 
in sympathy and love. In the fact of his presence 
faith has always exulted. 

Oh, where is He that trod the sea? 
My soul, the Lord is here; 

Then let thy fears be hushed in thee; 
To leap, to look, to hear, 

Be thine; thy needs He'll satisfy; 
Art thou diseased or dumb? 

Or dost thou in thy hunger cry? 
"I come," saith Christ, "I come." — T. T. Lynch. 

An old divine puts the seeming paradox thus, 
"While I am in this world Christ is with me, and 
when I leave it I will be with Christ." 



PART V 

THE PRESENCE UNIVERSALIZED; 

OR, THE PRESENCE IN 

THE HOLY SPIRIT 



87 



THE PRESENCE UNIVERSALIZED; 

OR, 

THE PRESENCE IN THE HOLY 

SPIRIT 

I. The Universality of the Presence the 
Climax of Divine Self-Manifestation 

The resurrection gives us a Christ who is spiritu- 
ally present; the Holy Spirit gives us a Christ who 
is universally present. By the coming of the Holy 
Spirit the risen Christ is made omnipresent, and 
the whole process of revelation here and now com- 
pleted. Nothing higher can be looked for until 
the veil is dropped on the other side. Momentous 
consequences follow the acceptance of this truth. 
If the age of the Spirit under which we are now 
living marks the final outgoing of God to man; if 
the God who is manifested in Christ is everywhere 
present in the Spirit; if through the mediumship 
of the Spirit he dwells in the inner sanctuary of 
the soul; if he is not only with man, but in man; 
if through the Holy Spirit his presence within 
the soul is realized as the presence of Christ, then 
the time foretold by Jesus has come when temples 
and shrines are no longer indispensable, when every 
man has immediate access to God as the Father, 
and when every humble receptive soul may become 
"an habitation of God in the Spirit." 

89 



90 THE PRESENCE 

It is the peculiar province of the Holy Spirit to 
make the universal presence of Christ known, that 
he may dwell in the consciousness of man. The 
Spirit is his witness within the soul. Christ says, 
"He shall glorify me : for he shall take of mine, and 
shall declare it unto you" (John i6. 14). He is 
not to give a new revelation of Christ, but a deeper 
understanding of the revelation already given in his 
teaching and work — especially in his work of 
redemption. He is also to give a deeper under- 
standing of Christ himself as an inner living Pres- 
ence : hiding behind him, making him known, and 
interpreting his operations in the soul in all their 
practical significance. Hence the testimony of 
Christian experience is not to be expressed in the 
words, "The Holy Spirit within me," but "Christ 
within me." The Christian is not conscious of the 
Holy Spirit, but he is conscious of the presence 
of Christ, revealed to him by the Holy Spirit. 

Christ is thus not merely present as spirit; he 
is present in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit as "the 
Spirit of Jesus," is the medium through which he 
is being spiritually revealed. Nowhere does the 
New Testament speak of the presence of the spirits 
of Peter, John, or Paul ; and yet we know that the 
spirits of these holy men are with us. Never was 
their influence more potent than it is to-day. 
Though dead they yet speak. But "the Spirit of 
Jesus" is with us in a different sense. The promise, 
"If I gO', I will send the Comforter unto you," is 
that of a special and personal coming on the part 



UNIVERSALIZED 91 

of Christ himself. To dilute the doctrine of his 
presence unto a belief of the presence among men 
of the Christ-spirit, or Christ-idea, or Christ-prin- 
ciple is to lose completely all significance of the 
connection between the coming of Christ and the 
coming of the Holy Spirit. Nothing is clearer 
in the teaching of Jesus than that in the Holy Spirit 
he himself was to be present ; that, in other words, 
the coming of the Holy Spirit was to be identical 
with his coming in the spirit. This idea was at 
first missed by the early Christians, who looked 
upon the second coming of Christ as an event 
separate and distinct from the coming of the Spirit ; 
but later on it dawned upon them; and nowhere 
do we find it more fully developed than in the 
writings of John, which contain the final message 
of the New Testament. 

It is sometimes said that the Holy Spirit is here 
as the representative of Christ. That is not so if 
what is meant is that he is here as the vicar or 
substitute of an absent Christ; but it is so if what 
is meant is that he is here as the agent through 
whom the presence of Christ is made efficacious. 
His mission is to reveal Christ in human souls. In 
his presence the presence of Christ is realized. 
When Jesus says of himself, "I will come unto 
you," and when he says of the Holy Spirit, "I will 
send him unto you," he means one and the same 
thing; for it is in the Holy Spirit whom he sends 
that he comes in fullness into the life of man. "The 
Spirit in his fullness," says Moberly, *'is the full- 



92 THE PRESENCE 

ness of the presence of Christ, which is the pres- 
ence of God." 

When the Holy Spirit came to the disciples, 
bringing to them the consciousness of the Saviour's 
presence, they were well content. They never 
thought of looking back, or of hankering after the 
old life. They had gained more than they had 
lost. The Christ of faith was better than the Christ 
of memory. He was now with them in a new and 
closer sense. In their fellowship with him there 
was scarcely a break. No sooner had he been out- 
wardly separated from them than they became 
inwardly and spiritually united to him; no sooner 
was he lost to sight than they were brought into 
a more intimate and complete fellowship with him 
through the medium of the Holy Spirit. Thus we 
see why Jesus said, "It is expedient for you that 
I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter 
will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send 
him unto you" (John i6. 7). The going away of 
Jesus was necessary to his fuller coming ; his going 
away in bodily form was necessary to his coming 
in spiritual form ; his going to heaven was necessary 
to his descent in the power of the Spirit; his 
absence from sight was necessary to his spiritual 
reunion with his disciples. Through the Holy 
Spirit he became to his disciples not "a mere sub- 
jective inward idea," but a real Presence with whom 
they held real communion. 

' It is not without significance that the coming 
of the Holy Spirit took place befpre that great 



UNIVERSALIZED 93 

catastrophe which shook the earth and the heavens, 
and in which the Jewish age passed away, to make 
ready for the mighty changes which were to come. 
He came to the disciples at a time when everything 
which they had regarded as stable seemed to melt 
into nothingness, to be their comforter, sustainer, 
and inspirer. He came to a disordered world that 
he might build upon the foundations of the ancient 
Jewish system, which had been "plowed as a field," 
a spiritual kingdom of which Christ should be the 
acknowledged King. His coming marked a new 
epoch. It was the inauguration of a spiritual move- 
ment which has continued to the present hour. 
Through all the Christian centuries the Holy Spirit 
has been at work, as Christ's Executive, to create 
a new social order. The work which Christ is now 
doing he is doing through the Spirit's agency. 
When Christ was upon earth the Holy Spirit 
worked through him; now he works through the 
Holy Spirit. 

In the Acts of the Apostles the central thought 
is that of the present Christ working with his 
people and giving to them prevailing power. The 
coming of Christ is the great event with which 
the book opens and which it illustrates. Very soon 
a transition is made from the coming of Christ 
to the coming of the Holy Spirit, because in the 
coming of the Holy Spirit the coming of Christ 
is consummated. To be understood the descent of 
the Holy Spirit at Pentecost has to be connected 
with the promised return of Christ himself; and 



94 THE PRESENCE 

such an expression as ''the outpouring of the Spirit," 
or "the baptism of the Spirit/' when stripped of 
its poetical quaUty simply denotes the fullness of 
power for the successful promotion of the work of 
Christ which the Holy Spirit imparts tO' all who 
open their hearts to his incoming. The things 
which the risen, living, present Christ did by the 
power of the Spirit through the apostles are still 
being done. The Acts of the Apostles is finished, 
but the records of acts performed in the name of 
Christ, and in the power of the Spirit, through 
other agencies, are now being written; and every 
fresh missionary triumph adds to them a new chap- 
ter. But, strictly speaking, these "acts" should 
not be spoken of as the acts of certain human work- 
ers, but as the acts of Christ done by certain human 
workers through the power of the Spirit. 

But not through Christian agencies alone does 
the Spirit work. His brooding presence is over 
every soul; tO' every heart he finds some way of 
access. There are no walls too high for him to 
scale, no gates too firmly barred for him to pass 
through. His presence is often elusive; it is as the 
wind which bloweth where it listeth; it underlies 
the ordinary experiences of life; it works through 
the ordinary processes of thought; it operates 
especially in the moral nature, creating thirst for 
the living water, hunger for the living bread, and 
bringing to bear upon sinful hearts the saving grace 
of the living Christ. And because the Holy Spirit 
is everywhere at work the vision of the Christ of 



UNIVERSALIZED 95 

Glory, whom he seeks to reveal, may at any time 
break upon the soul, as a glad surprise, as it did to 
Saul of Tarsus, repeating the miracle of changing 
a persecutor into a disciple, a blasphemer into a 
worshiper. 

11. The Perpetuity of the Presence Involved 
IN ITS Universality 

To the universality of the Presence is to be joined 
the perpetuity of the Presence. The Christ who is 
present in the Holy Spirit does not come and go ; 
he is not confined to certain times and seasons. 
His presence is perpetual and abiding. When about 
to leave his disciples, Jesus said, "I will pray the 
Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, 
that he may abide with [meta] you forever; even 
the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot 
receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth 
him ; but ye know him ; for he dwelleth with [para] 
you, and shall be in [en] you" (John 14. 16, 17). 
The three prepositions here used have a deepening 
import. When Christ is loved and obeyed his 
Spirit abides with us in the sense that his presence 
is continuous; he dwells zvith us in the sense that 
he keeps beside us so that we may have fellowship 
with him; he is in us in the sense that he is domi- 
ciled in our hearts, so that we are free from 
dependence upon outward things. (See Bible Com- 
mentary in loco.) 

The meaning of the word translated "Com- 
forter" is "one that stands by the side of another" ; 



96 THE PRESENCE 

so that, when Jesus was visibly absent, the Holy 
Spirit was to stand by their side, rendering them 
whatever help they might need. The expression 
"another Comforter" indicates that Jesus himself 
had held that office in the first instance, and that 
now the Holy Spirit was to share it with him. 
In the work of Comforting men they were hence- 
forth to be jointly engaged. 

Here, then, is what the consummated Presence 
means: it means that in the Holy Spirit the com- 
forting, helping Christ stands by men forever; it 
means that in place of the "sweet Galilsean vision," 
which appeals to the imagination and the heart, 
but which was only temporary, we have a spiritual 
Presence which is eternal. The spiritual Christ 
is ever with us. Although we cannot see him with 
our bodily eyes, he is present to our faith. When 
he commissioned his disciples to go forth and 
preach the good tidings to all the nations, he 
encouraged them with the assurance, "And lo, I 
am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world," or, more literally, "Lo, I am with you all 
the days, even unto the consummation of the age" 
(Matt. 28. 20, m.arginal reading. Rev. Ver.). This 
promise in its primary application was special and 
temporary. It stretched across a period so brief 
that the expression used is "to the end of the days." 
To the end of these approaching days of trial, down 
to the consummation of the age then closing, the 
Lord promised to be with his messengers. The 
promise of his presence was not, however, to be 



UNIVERSALIZED 97 

annulled at the consummation of the age then 
closing. Contrariwise, it was to be confirmed and 
enlarged in the new age. What Christ was to be to 
a few down to the time when the destruction of the 
Jewish theocracy made the world-wide kingdom 
possible, he was thereafter to be to all. The con- 
tents of this promise, therefore, no longer rest 
upon a temporary guaranty of his personal pres- 
ence, to be given to a few, but upon something 
given in himself to all. Having returned in spirit, 
and in the Spirit, he is present everywhere and 
always to the world-encircling body of his follow- 
ers. He will be with us all the days; in the day 
of gladness when the world is bathed in sunshine, 
and in the day of sorrow when the world is draped 
in black ; in the day when the heart is light and toil 
a joy, and in the day of weariness, when the back 
is bending under its heavy burden; in the day of 
victory, and in the day of humiHating defeat ; in the 
day when we dwell in some peaceful retreat, shel- 
tered from the noontide sun, and in the day when 
we cross the wold facing the bitter blast; in the 
day when we are rejoicing over some surprise of 
happiness, and in the day when we are smarting 
from the pain of a secret wound ; in the day when 
we are glad because the treasures of the heart have 
been preserved to us, and in the day when in desola- 
tion of soul we sit beside our dead, or go to the 
grave to weep there. Yes, ''all the days" he is 
with us! 
We are not, therefore, to pray for the coming 



98 THE PRESENCE 

of the Comforter, but for his incoming; we are 
not to pray for the return of Christ, but for the 
reaHzation of his presence. To discern the pres- 
ence of the Comforter as the presence of Christ 
within us is to be brought at once into contact with 
the source of life and power; it is to have an 
Almighty arm upon which to lean; it is to have 
the darkness of despair changed into the sunshine 
of eternal hope. 

III. The Universal Presence is Necessarily a 
Spiritual Presence 

To the spiritual alone does universality belong. 
All outward manifestations of the Presence must 
needs be local and temporary. They could appeal 
only to a few, and would fail to meet the demands 
of the case. To come to all Christ must come 
spiritually. But there always have been, and always 
will be, sense-bound souls to whom a physical pres- 
ence alone is a real presence, and to whom the 
presence of a spiritual Christ is shadowy and 
intangible. They seem to have difficulty in connect- 
ing personality with spiritual existence, and are 
firmly intrenched in the position that the personal 
coming of Christ must of necessity be a physical 
coming. This, at first, was the attitude of the 
early disciples. They found it difficult to believe 
that when the bodily presence of Christ was with- 
drawn a spiritual presence just as real had taken 
its place. Even after they had received the Holy 
Spirit they were not satisfied. They wanted some- 



UNIVERSALIZED 99 

thing more. They wanted the presence of Christ 
himself. After his return to heaven they waited 
and watched for some outward manifestation of 
his presence. Their eyes were directed to the 
clouds, not to their own hearts. Even after Pente- 
cost, when the Holy Spirit came upon them in full- 
ness, they had little to say about the presence of 
Christ among them. The earliest Christian docu- 
ments, namely, the First and Second Epistles to 
the Thessalonians, are taken up almost exclusively 
with the expected return and reappearance of 
Christ. Clearly, the disciples were not yet deliv- 
ered from the outward; they did not yet see that 
a presence may be at once spiritual and personal. 
In his later epistles, however, Paul shows that the 
church was steadily gaining an appreciation of the 
spiritual, and was beginning to think of Christ, not 
after the flesh, but after the spirit. He also shows 
that, although they were not entirely liberated from 
the outward, never did they hark back to the Christ 
who lived and died, but kept eagerly pressing for- 
ward to know more of the Christ who had risen. 
Their watchword was not, "Remember the past," 
but, "Behold the glory of the present." 

In John's Gospel the transition from the out- 
ward to the spiritual is at length reached, and the 
coming of the Holy Spirit is seen to be inseparably 
connected with the spiritual coming of Christ. In- 
deed, the one was the agency through which the 
other was realized. And when the experience came 
to them of the presence of Christ made real and 



100 THE PRESENCE 

effectual by the Holy Spirit, they found the thing 
for which they had longed in a better form than 
they had ever dreamed. 

One reason for the difficulty which many in the 
present day experience in seeing that the second 
coming of Christ was at once spiritual and personal, 
comes from the failure to distinguish in the teach- 
ing of the New Testament between the coming 
of Christ and the signs by which his coming was 
to be accompanied. The signs were to be outward 
and visible, the coming itself was to be silent and 
secret. The most outstanding sign was the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem. When the disciples asked the 
Master, "What shall be the sign of thy coming?" 
he pointed them to the destruction of the temple 
and the Holy City. But to confound that catas- 
trophic event with the coming of Christ itself, as is 
often done, is to miss the point of our Saviour's 
teaching. It was the outward sign of his coming; 
the coming itself was spiritual. 

When that cataclysm was over, and the temple 
had been swept away, and the old city which the 
apostles knew had departed forever, there was a 
change in the existing world-order. Upon the 
ruins of the old temple was to rise a new spiritual 
temple, a temple not made with hands, a temple in 
which all the world could worship; and upon the 
ruins of the old Jerusalem was to rise a new 
city of God — a city spiritual, heavenly, eternal, the 
center of the kingdom which Christ was to establish 
on the earth. 



UNIVERSALIZED loi 

In the synoptical Gospels the setting of the doc- 
trine of the Second Advent is essentially eschatologi- 
cal. The coloring is taken from Jewish apocalyptic 
literature. But the figurative words of Jesus must 
not be taken too literally. The poetry must not 
be squeezed out of them. They are to be treated 
from the normative rather than from the strictly 
literal point of view, as seminal rather than as 
exact and formal statements of truth. The idea 
of the presence of Christ is not exhausted in these 
events. It is something that survives these and 
all other changes; something which runs on to 
the end of the gospel dispensation; something 
which it is the peculiar province of the Holy Spirit 
to make real to the thought of men; something 
which is to be increasingly manifested in the 
world's life, and find its consummation in those 
scenically described events, embracing two worlds, 
in which the present dispensation is wound up. 

Taking a wide survey of this entire subject, 
Dr. James Denney sums the matter up in these 
calm and measured words: "It may be frankly 
admitted that the return of Christ to his disciples 
is capable of different interpretations. He came 
again, though it were but intermittently, when he 
appeared to them after his resurrection. He came 
again to abide with them personally when his Spirit 
was given to the church at Pentecost. He came, 
they would all feel who lived to see it, signally at 
the destruction of Jerusalem, when God executed 
judgment historically on the race which had 



102 THE PRESENCE 

rejected him, and when the Christian Church was 
finally and decisively liberated from the very possi- 
bility of dependence upon the Jewish. He comes 
still in the great crises of history when the old 
order changes, yielding place to the new." He 
holds also that he is to come again at the end 
of the world. The only thing that needs to be 
added to that admirable summary is, that however 
he may have come in the past, any coming which 
may take place in the future will be merely the 
disclosure of his spiritual, universal, and per- 
petually abiding Presence, which is now revealed 
to us in and by the Holy Spirit. 



PART VI 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE PRES- 
ENCE IN THE NEW 
TESTAMENT 



103 



THE DOCTRINE OF THE PRESENCE IN 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 

I. The Immediacy of Christ's Return 

Nothing could be more clear and explicit than 
the promise of the departing Christ that he would 
speedily return to his bereaved disciples. "I will 
not leave you orphans: I come unto you. Yet a 
little while, and the world beholdeth me no more ; 
but ye behold me" (John 14. 18, 19). His coming 
was to be in the lifetime of the disciples. "When 
they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another ; 
for verily I say unto you. Ye shall not have gone 
over the cities of Israel till the Son of man be 
come" (Matt. lO; 2^). Among those who listened 
to Jesus were some who were to be alive at the time 
of his return. "Verily I say unto you. There be 
some standing here, which shall not taste of death, 
till they see the Son of man coming in his king- 
dom" (Matt. 16. 28). Again he says, "Verily I say 
unto you. This generation shall not pass away, till 
all these things be accomplished" (Matt. 24. 34; 
Mark 13. 30; Luke 21. 32). W^hen Peter was fore- 
told that he would glorify God by a death of martyr- 
dom he pointed to John and asked, "Concerning 
this man, what?" Jesus answered, "If I will that 
he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" (John 
21. 22). The answer of Jesus was a plain intima- 



io6 THE PRESENCE 

tion that John would Hve to see his return in his 
kingly power and glory. The closing words of the 
book of Revelation are, ''Yea, I come quickly," 
and the attitude and answer of a waiting church 
to its ascended Lord, was, "Amen. Come, Lord 
Jesus." It is not possible for words to be freer 
from ambiguity. That the speedy return of Christ 
was according to promise is one of the most clearly 
revealed truths of Scripture. 

The question which we are compelled to face is. 
Did Jesus keep his promise ? Did he come speedily, 
as he said he would? To say that after the lapse 
of nearly nineteen hundred years he has not yet 
returned is to charge him with being unfaithful 
to his promise. But since that position is abhorrent, 
we are forced to conclude that he did return 
speedily; and the only thing left for us to do is to 
interpret his teachings in the light of that indis- 
putable fact. 

IL The Mistake of the Disciples 

That Christ was about to return was the uni- 
versal belief of the early church. Upon other ques- 
tions they might differ, upon this question there 
was perfect unanimity of opinion. Were they mis- 
taken? Not upon this point. The teaching of 
Jesus was too explicit to admit of such a possi- 
bility. But while they were not mistaken as to 
the fact of Christ's speedy coming, they were mis- 
taken as to its manner. He came when they 
expected, but not as they expected. In this there 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 107 

is nothing strange. Is the manner of divine 
approach ever exactly that which was anticipated? 

The indisputable proof that they were mistaken 
regarding the nature of Christ's coming is the fact 
that he did not come in the physical and visible way 
in which they had so confidently expected him to 
come. Nor has he come in that way yet ; although 
in each succeeding generation there have been 
those who have indulged in the same delusive hope. 
Dates have been fixed again and again, but *'the 
pathway of the church has been strewn with the 
wrecks of such chronologies." 

The mistake of the early disciples was a natural 
one. Their minds were possessed of certain pre- 
suppositions. They looked for a very different kind 
of a Messiah than a spiritual one, and a very differ- 
ent kind of kingdom than a spiritual one. Their 
minds were steeped in the current Messianic sym- 
bolism, so that they unconsciously gave an apocalyp- 
tic coloring to the events which Jesus portrayed. 
They did not seem to understand that in his doctrine 
of last things he was dealing with the issues of 
character; nor did they give due consideration to 
that other class of parables which indicated that the 
final end of things was far remote — as, for instance, 
the parables of the leaven and of the mustard seed, 
which show that his kingdom was to be a thing of 
gradual growth; the parable of the leaven setting 
forth its inward silent development, and that of 
the mustard seed its outward development as 
expressed in organizations and institutions. Gradu- 



io8 THE PRESENCE 

ally, under the tuition of the Holy Spirit, they over- 
came their disappointment and corrected their mis- 
take; and, coming to see that Christ had returned 
when he said, and as he said, they lived rejoicingly 
in his presence. 

III. The Mistake of the Critics 

Writers like Gibbon and Renan make capital out 
of the generally accepted view that without doubt 
Jesus foretold the end of the world within a human 
lifetime. Their inference is, of course, that he 
was mistaken. Professor Huxley takes the same 
position and boldly declares that, "if Jesus believed 
and taught his speedy return, then surely he was 
under an illusion; and he is responsible for that 
which the mere effuxion of time has demonstrated 
to be a prodigious error." But all such reasoning 
loses its force when it is seen that what Jesus pre- 
dicted was not the end of the world, but the end 
of the age; and that he promised to return at the 
end of the age, not at the end of the world. It 
is simply unaccountable that the translators of the 
New Testament, down to the revisers, should have 
persisted in rendering the word aion, which Jesus 
employed in his oft-recurring phrase, **the end of 
the age," by the term "world." He had not in his 
mind the remotest conception of the end of the 
cosmos, or habitable earth. What he was think- 
ing of was the end of the Jewish age then fast run- 
ning to its close. He conceived of the world's his- 
tory as consisting in a succession of aions, or ages, 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 109 

one of which was about to end ; and what he prom- 
ised was that he would come at the end of that 
age. That he kept his promise there cannot be 
the isHghtest question. And, standing upon that 
ground, we can repel every charge of illusion or 
error. The faithful and true Witness came when 
he said he would come; and, having come, he is 
now present. 

Think what the acceptance of this conclusion 
implies. It implies that Christ meant what he said ; 
it implies that his words "this generation" do not 
need to be put upon the rack, and stretched out so 
as to embrace centuries and millenniums; and, 
more important than all, it implies that in a higher 
sense than ever Jesus is our Immanuel — God with 
us. His presence is the distinguishing glory of this 
new age — this age of spiritual privilege and power. 
It is our joy for the present, our hope for the 
future. A world with Christ in it need not be a 
desolate place, a world v/ith Christ in it is not going 
down to destruction, but up to redemption. 

IV. The Mistake of the Commentators 

The fundamental mistake of a large class of com- 
mentators — both premillennarian and postmillen- 
narian — has been in interpreting the words of 
Scripture regarding the second coming of Christ 
as if they were literal descriptions of the mode of 
his coming, instead of being mere statements of 
the fact. A conspicuous instance of this is founded 
in the interpretation of Acts i. 11, where an answer 



no THE PRESENCE 

is supposed to be given to the question, How was 
Christ to come? — an answer, moreover, which is 
understood to close the entire case. The text reads 
thus, "This Jesus, who was received up from you 
into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye 
beheld him going into heaven." Alford says of 
the expression "in like manner" (hon tropon), that 
it is "to be taken in all cases Hterally, not as imply- 
ing mere certainty." It would be nearer the truth 
to say that in no case is it to be taken literally, but 
always as implying mere certainty. 

There are in all seven instances in the New 
Testament, besides that in the text already quoted, 
in which the expression hon tropon occurs, and it 
is safe to say that in not one of them is it employed 
in a modal sense. A rapid glance at all of these 
texts will make this apparent. When Jesus said 
to the Jews, "How often would I have gathered 
thy children together, even as a hen gathers her 
chickens under her wings" (Matt. 23. ^y), does 
anyone for a moment suppose that these words 
indicate the outward form in which our Lord was 
to draw spiritual wanderers to himself? Or, when 
one of the two Hebrews whom Moses separated 
in a quarrel turned round and asked him, "Wouldest 
thou kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian yester- 
day?" (Acts 7. 28), are we to suppose that he had 
in his mind the precise form of death to which the 
Egyptian had been subjected? Or, when Paul says 
to Timothy, "Even as Jannes and Jambres with- 
stood Moses, so do these also withstand the truth" 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT in 

(2 Tim. 3. 8), are we to infer that the opposition 
of the libertines who listened to Timothy took on 
exactly the same form as that of these two notori- 
ous opponents of Moses? Or, where Jude declares 
that those who give themselves over to sins of the 
flesh shall suffer eternal fire, "even as Sodom and 
Gomorrah, and the cities about them" (verse 7), 
are we to conclude that their punishment was to 
be the same in form as the fiery judgment which 
fell upon the cities of the plain? Or, when Paul, 
before the council of Jerusalem, utters the manifesto, 
''We believe that we shall be saved through the 
grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, in like manner as 
they" (Acts 15. 11), can we conceive that he is 
referring to anything save the certainty of the 
salvation of the Gentiles? Or, when he tries to 
comfort his fellow voyagers during a storm by say- 
ing, "Be of good cheer: for I believe God, that it 
shall be even so as it hath been spoken unto me" 
(Acts 2y, 25), can anyone imagine that his words 
denote anything more than the certainty of deliver- 
ance? 

The application of this induction of instances to 
the correct interpretation of the text in question 
is obvious. All that can be legitimately drawn from 
the expression hon tropon is, as Meyer has so well 
said, that Jesus would come again even as his 
disciples had seen him go away. The emphasis 
is not to be put upon the form of his going or com- 
ing, but upon the fact that he was to come just as 
really as he had gone. The force of the words is : 



112 THE PRESENCE 

''This Jesus, the very same Jesus who has vanished 
from sight, shall come again even as ye have seen 
him go away into heaven. The heaven that opened 
to receive him will open tO' restore him. You will 
not be separated from him forever. Do not, there- 
fore, stand gazing up into heaven ! Return to your 
unfinished tasks with joy and hope. In a little 
while your lost Lord will come to you to abide with 
you forever." 

However much he might be changed outwardly 
by his ascension, he was to be in no essential respect 
different from what he had been. His identity was 
to continue. In being glorified he was not to be 
dehumanized; in being exalted above the highest 
heavens he was not to be lifted out of sympathy 
and fellowship with those whose nature he wore. 
He was still to be the Friend and Brother of man. 
There was to be no broken link in the chain of 
common relationship which bound him to his own. 
His glorification was to be the glorification of 
humanity ; his spiritual presence was to be the pres- 
ence of the human Jesus brought home to the uni- 
versal heart. The same Jesus, himself and no 
other, was to come back as he had gone up. 

Did he come back? Did his disciples find him 
again? Nothing can be more certain. They saw 
him come amid signs and wonders manifold. By 
mistaking the signs for the thing signified, they 
for a time missed the meaning of his advent. But 
the scales fell from their eyes, and he became dis- 
cernible to them in a spiritual sense. To their 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 113 

restored Lord they became consciously united, and 
in his presence they rejoiced as those who had 
found a friend whom they had mourned as dead, 
a leader who had been given up as lost. Continuity 
was thus given to their experience, and with that 
same Jesus who was taken up into heaven they 
were now inseparably united. 

V. The Meaning of the Terms Employed 
There are four words by which the second com- 
ing of Christ is set forth in the New Testament. 
One of these words, which occurs only a few times, 
is apokalupsis, which means the lifting of the veil. 
Another is epiphaneia, from which the word ''epiph- 
any" is derived — which means the outshining of 
the glory that is hidden. The two words which 
are more commonly used are erdhomai and pa- 
rotisia. These two words are never used inter- 
changeably, but have each a fixed and definite mean- 
ing. The one refers to the coming, the other to 
the Presence, which is the result of the coming; 
in other words, the one refers to the approach or 
arrival of the one who is distant, and the other 
to the permanent nearness of the one who has come. 
Endless confusion would be avoided if this dis- 
tinction were always carefully observed. The dis- 
tinction will be m-ade clear by a reference to the 
two classes of texts involved. In the first class 
the idea is always that of approach or arrival. 
From a long array of instances take the following : 
"The Son of man shall come [arrive] in the glory" 



114 THE PRESENCE 

(Matt. i6. 27). "Ye know not on what day your 
Lord Cometh" [will arrive] (Matt. 24. 42). "Be- 
hold, the bridegroom cometh" [approacheth] ; go 
ye out to meet him" (Matt. 25. 6). "Henceforth 
ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right 
hand of Power, and coming [drawing near] on the 
clouds of heaven" (Matt. 26. 64). 

In the second class of texts the idea is always 
that of being present, or alongside of. It is pass- 
ing strange that the Revisers should have overlooked 
this distinction and should have persisted in retain- 
ing the term "coming" as the rendering for 
parousia, and have put the term ''presence" in the 
margin, for parousia does not mean "coming." 
It means "presence," and nothing but "presence." 
The lexicons never give to it any other meaning. 
The implication in the word is that the one who 
was approaching has arrived and is now present. 
His coming has resulted in the presence, or, rather, 
it has merged into the presence. A hasty glance 
at all the texts in which the word parousia occurs 
will make the meaning clear. "What shall be the 
sign of thy presence, and of the consummation of 
the age?" (Matt. 24. 3.) That is, "What shall 
be the outward sign that thou art really here in thy 
spiritual presence, and that the old age has passed 
away, and the new age has come ?" The answer is, 
"As the lightning cometh forth from the east, and is 
seen even unto the west, so shall be the presence 
of the Son of man" (Matt. 24. 2y). It was to come 
suddenly, taking men by surprise. An illustration 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 115 

of its suddenness is drawn from the Noahic flood 
(Matt. 24. 37-39). In the resurrection-Hfe which 
the Presence was to usher in, the dead and the 
living were alike to share, "Christ the firstfruits; 
then they that are Christ's at his presence" ( i Cor. 
15. 23). At the Presence there was to be a new 
appraisement of values, and nothing was to be 
gloried in but spiritual gains. "What is our hope, 
or joy, or crown of rejoicing?" asks Paul. "Are 
not even ye, before our Lord Jesus at his pres- 
ence?" (i Thess. 2. 19). Paul reminds the Thessa- 
lonians that he sought for them increase of love 
"to the end" that fheir' hearts might be established 
"unblamable in holiness before our God and 
Father, at the presence of our Lord Jesus, with his 
saints" (i Thess. 3. 13). That all Christians were 
to participate in the benefits of the Second Advent 
is brought out in the words, "We that are alive, 
that are left unto the presence of the Lord, shall 
in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep" 
(i Thess. 4. 15). That the Presence was regarded 
as the summiim honum of Christian hope, is evident 
from the apostolic prayer, "The God of peace him- 
self sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and 
soul and body be preserved entire, without blame 
at the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ" ( i Thess. 
5. 23). In view of the excitement and disturbance 
caused by the belief in the immediacy of Christ's 
return, Paul exhorts the Thessalonians "touching 
the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our 
gathering together unto him/' that thev be not 



ii6 THE PRESENCE 

perturbed in their mind by anything he had written 
to them, "as that the day of the Lord is just at 
hand" (2 Thess. 2. 2). Although at hand, it 
had not yet come. Before that day should come 
"the lawless one" was to be revealed, "whom the 
Lord Jesus" was to "consume with the breath of his 
mouth, and bring to nought by the manifestation of 
his presence" (2 Thess. 2. 8) — thus prophetically 
displaying the power of his presence to destroy sin. 
To those who were becoming faint-hearted in view 
of the growing distress of the times, the apostle 
James said, "Be patient therefore, brethren, until 
the presence of the Lord" (James 5. 7). Again he 
says, "Stablish your hearts : for the presence of the 
Lord is at hand" (James 5. 8). Defending the 
truthfulness of his message concerning the Pres- 
ence, Peter says, "We did not follow cunningly 
devised fables, when we made known unto you the 
power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, but 
were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Pet. i. 16). 
He declares that the same Jesus whose glory he 
beheld on the mount of transfiguration was about to 
come in the power of his spiritual presence to abide 
with his people forever. When scoffers asked, 
"Where is the promise of his presence?" (2 Pet. 
3. 4) they were told that they might read the 
answer to their question in the past faithfulness 
of God to every word which he had spoken. In 
the face of the scoffs of unbelievers, Christians 
were to maintain the attitude of "earnestly desiring 
the presence of the day of God" (2 Pet. 3. 12) — 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 117 

that eventful day which was to usher in "new 
heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness." And as the last of the apostolic writers 
was inditing his final message, he says, "Now, my 
little children, abide in him; that, if he shall be 
manifested, we may have boldness, and not be 
ashamed before him at his presence" (2 John 
2. 28). 

From this survey of texts it is clear that in the 
order of time and development the coming pre- 
ceded the Presence ; and that there must have been 
a point at which it passed into the Presence. The 
one who was coming came, and because he came 
he is present. The coming was a thing of the past, 
the Presence is a thing of "all the days" ; the com- 
ing was temporary, the Presence is permanent ; the 
coming was a fact of history, the Presence is a fact 
of experience. 

VI. The Attitude to be Maintained 

All Christians must certainly desire to occupy 
the true scriptural attitude with regard to the 
Second Advent. If it is still in the future, we 
ought to maintain toward it a waiting and watch- 
ing attitude, and as it draws nearer anticipate it 
with increasing eagerness; but if it has taken 
place, we ought to know it, and not relegate to 
the future what belongs to the present, and keep 
waiting for that which has already happened. The 
early church believed that the Second Advent was 
imminent, and, acting according to her faith, 



ii8 THE PRESENCE 

"turned to God from idols, to serve the living and 
true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven." 
The church of to-day is most assuredly not in that 
attitude. She is supine and apathetic, and is neither 
looking for Christ nor expecting much from him. 

It is said that since the church has lost the atti- 
tude of waiting, something of her bloom and grace 
has gone. Whether that be so or not, all efforts to 
restore this attitude, in the old way, have been 
sporadic or vain. There is an ever-diminishing 
circle of believers whose faith finds nourishment 
and inspiration in looking for the fulfillment, in 
their day, of the hopes which history has long 
since shown to have been mistakenly cherished by 
the early church. One of that circle in a recent 
address gives the following personal testimony: 
"To me the second coming is the perpetual Hght 
upon the path which makes the present bearable. 
I never lay my head on the pillow without thinking 
that maybe before the morning breaks the final 
morning may have dawned. I never begin my work 
in the morning without thinking perhaps he may 
interrupt my work to begin his own. Take away 
from me this hope, and tell me to preach the gospel, 
and I must give the whole thing up; but with this 
hope in my heart I can work on and wait for the 
wind that presages the dawn." These words from 
Dr. G. Campbell Morgan are truly pathetic. They 
show that in clinging to a personal Advent he falls 
back into the old error that to be personal it must 
be physical. He allows himself to indulge in the 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 119 

human craving for "the touch of a vanished hand, 
and the sound of a voice that is still." He fails 
to remember that the Lord has come in a closer, 
dearer way than when he lived among men in 
mortal form; and that he now appeals to the soul 
and not to the senses. O, it is pitiful to find, at this 
late day. Christians looking for their Lord to come 
in the clouds of heaven when he is forever at their 
side; yea, when he is even dwelling within their 
hearts. 

The Parousia, once the object of desire and hope, 
is now the object of a blessed experience. The 
withdrawal of Christ from earth, and his separa- 
tion from his own, were merely temporary. He has 
returned to unveil his hidden glory and to carry 
to completion his work of redemption. And surely 
those who are the subjects of his saving grace ought 
to be the last to minify the fact of his coming, or 
to push into the future the fact of his personal 
presence! If he has not come; if he is not really 
here, it is difficult to see what gain has accrued 
from his resurrection. Matthew Arnold speaks of 
him as dead, and of the Syrian stars as looking 
down upon his grave, and therefore he regards the 
hopes that men have built upon him as vain. Mod- 
ern skepticism is thoroughly alive to the fact that 
this is the crux of the question of Christ's tran- 
scendent claims. Robert Blatchford, recently assail- 
ing, in the Clarion, the position of a certain religious 
leader, who seemed to deny the resurrection of 
Christ, said of him, ''He cannot long reconcile his 



120 THE PRESENCE 

reason to the worship of a dead man" who is "obUvi- 
ous to our hopes, prayers, and sorrows." Of course 
not. If Jesus is a dead man, those who have trusted 
in him are of all men most pitiable. 

Equally defenseless is the position that, although 
he has risen from the dead, he is in a distant 
heaven, out of personal touch with human affairs. 
Many who spurn the idea that he is dead, think of 
him as personally absent, and are hoping that he 
may return to this forsaken world before long. 
They have failed to see the blessed truth, which 
waits for more distinct recognition, that the doctrine 
of the Lord's return carries with it the heart-mov- 
ing fact of his presence, and that hence the church 
of to-day ought to be filled and fired with the con- 
viction that her absent Lord has been restored to 
her, and that he is ever with her. The apostles, 
believing that Christ had gone to heaven, looked for 
him to be revealed from heaven ; we, believing that 
he has returned to earth, look for the ever-increas- 
ing revelation of his presence on the earth. The 
apostles, believing that his coming was imminent, 
cried out of the heart of the gathering storm, 
"Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly"; we, believing 
that his promise regarding his return has been ful- 
filled, and that he is now actively at work in the 
world, cry exultingly, 

"Joy to the world ! the Lord is come ; 

Let earth receive her King; 
Let every heart prepare him room, 
And heaven and nature sing." 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 121 

The prayer of the church has been changed from 
a prayer for the coming of a King who is absent 
to a prayer for the manifestation of the sovereign 
power and glory of a King who is present. 

It is therefore clear as a sunbeam that the proper 
attitude for the saints of to-day is not that of look- 
ing with straining eyes to a shut heaven which 
still retains their absent Lord, but that of looking 
up into the face of the Christ who has come, and 
whose gracious presence broods over every heart. 
When we look to heaven to find Christ we look 
too far away. "Say not in thy heart, who shall 
ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down)" 
(Rom. 10. 6). The Lord has descended from 
heaven and is inseparably united with his people. 
Instead of going back of the time of fulfillment, 
and waiting with heart-breaking agony for his long- 
delayed appearing, we are to rejoice in his pres- 
ence as a blessed certainty; instead of waiting for 
him we are to wait upon him ; instead of searching 
for signs of his coming we are to read the signs 
of his presence ; instead of looking up into the silent 
heavens, listening for some message from his lips, 
we are to catch the whispering of his voice within, 
and answer in his name its call for service in the 
world around us. Those who look to the heavens 
are in danger of overlooking the things that have 
already come from the heavens; those who keep 
gazing heavenward are in danger of overlooking 
the things that are close at hand, and that call for 
the attention of the present moment. 



122 THE PRESENCE 

If I kept my eager eyes 
Always uplifted to the skies — 

Some little thing 
Beneath my feet might dying be 
That needed tender care from me. 

He looks too high who looks above the duty that 
is near, and the Christ who is present to observe 
how he performs it. 

The literal view of Christ's second coming was 
doomed to disappointment, for it was founded upon 
a mistaken interpretation of Scripture; yet in spite 
of the fact that it awakened hopes which when 
deferred made the heart grow sick — hopes which 
the most ingenious calculations as to the year, if 
not the day and the hour, failed to bolster up — ■ 
it carried at the heart of it a partial truth, and 
hence had vital power. It brought the Saviour 
near to the thought and life of men; it made him 
not only the object of faith but of hope; it cen- 
tered expectation on him as the one by whom the 
fondest dreams concerning the world's future 
were to be realized. The attitude which it pro- 
duced is one which the church of to-day has still 
better reasons for occupying, for the thought of 
a Christ who has come must surely excite more 
rapturous expectations than the thought of a Christ 
who is coming. It is sometimes said that if we 
believed that Christ would come again to-morrow, 
our pulse beat would quicken, and our feet would 
hasten to complete unfinished tasks ; but if we really 
believed that Christ is with us to-day, would we be 



DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 123 

less deeply moved? Would we be less watchful 
of our ways, or less eager to fill our lives to the 
brim with his appointed service? When Christians 
live in the Presence they will live grandly; their 
hope which now burns low will be fanned into 
a soaring flame, and they will live in constant 
expectation of fresh miracles from his hand — more 
marvelous as manifestations of his power and 
glory than any this world has ever witnessed. 

But whatever view may be held touching the 
manifestation of Christ in the future; whatever 
the future may bring in the way of a clearer out- 
shining of his hidden glory, or a mightier outgoing 
of his saving power, the loss will be irreparable if 
the fact of his presence be questioned, or the sense 
of his presence be weakened. No greater need 
presses upon the church of to-day than that of gain- 
ing a realizing sense of the real and abiding pres- 
ence of the living Lord as a powerful ally whom 
nothing can vanquish. A distant Christ will give 
a discouraged church; a dead Christ will give a 
dead church. A Christ who is present will give 
a church bounding with hope; a Christ who is liv- 
ing will give a church pulsating with life ; a Christ 
who is supreme in the spiritual realm, and who is 
operating the spiritual forces at his command for 
the establishment of his kingdom on the earth, will 
give a church radiant with hope concerning the 
future of the world. Let the church take hold of 
the truth that the Bridegroom has returned to his 
bride, and the days of her mourning will be over, 



124 THE PRESENCE 

and her weeds of widowhood exchanged for festal 
robes. Life will no longer be dark, earth will no 
longer be dreary. Shining in the radiance of a 
new-found hope, she will be seen coming up out 
of the wilderness leaning upon the Beloved, 



PART VII 
THE PRESENCE AS IT NOW IS 



"5 



THE PRESENCE AS IT NOW IS 
I. The Inward Witness to the Presence 

The witness of Christian consciousness to the 
presence of the risen, Hving- Christ is clear and 
emphatic. The Christian of to-day does not require 
to go back in thought over the space of nineteen 
centuries to find his Christ. He is now beside him ; 
he Hves in the atmosphere of his presence ; he is in 
actual touch with him; he has personal dealings 
with him; he speaks to his heart; he is his unseen 
Friend and Helper; in the secret of his presence 
he continually abides. As well try to argue him 
out of the belief in his own existence as to argue 
him out of the belief that Christ is ever with him, 
a potent influence in his life, the inexhaustible 
source of inward peace and strength and joy. 

It is reported that Dr. Harnack once said to 
his students in the classroom: "The evidence In 
behalf of the resurrection of Jesus in the New 
Testament is not as satisfactory as I could wish. 
There are many difficulties in the record which it 
is not easy to get over ; but, speaking as a Christian 
man, I would say, T know that Christ has risen.' " 
Now, what is it that brought to this Christian 
scholar conclusive evidence that Christ has risen? 
What is it that enabled him to triumph over doubt, 
and to be unmoved by the opposition and denials 
127 



128 THE PRESENCE 

of others? Undoubtedly the personal sense of the 
Lord's presence; the unshaken conviction that in 
all the deepest experiences of life the Lord had 
been with him ; and that he had received substantial 
benefits directly from his hand. To the same 
experience an innumerable company of competent 
witnesses have in every age been ready to testify. 

It is universally conceded that the testimony of 
consciousness is to be accepted as trustworthy. If 
there is anything about which a man is sure, he is 
sure of what takes place within the sphere of his 
own consciousness. A religion based upon the 
facts of consciousness not only presents evidence 
capable of scientific treatment, it presents evidence 
which admits of no gainsaying. The experience 
which any man has of Christ places him in a strong- 
hold of certainty from which the artillery of logic 
is powerless to dislodge him. His experience may 
be explained, but it cannot be explained away. 

One advantage of the evidence of experience is 
that it is within the reach of all. Almost all the 
disturbing discussions, the echoes of which reach 
the rank and file of the church, have to do mainly 
with the externalities of religion. They deal with 
questions of history, chronology, philosophy, and 
the like. The kind of evidence with which they 
are concerned is available to but few; but the 
inward, personal evidence of experience is open 
to all. When the reaHty of Christ's power to save 
is put to the practical test, doubt is scattered to the 
winds; when the living bread is eaten it is found 



AS IT NOW IS 129 

to nourish and satisfy the famishing heart of man ; 
when the challenge is accepted, "Taste and see 
that the Lord is good," invincible proof is afforded 
that his goodness is divine. 

Another advantage of the evidence of experience 
is that it makes its possessor independent of all 
outward testimony. When anyone can say, "Christ 
has come into my life; I have enjoyed the con- 
sciousness of his presence ; I have walked with him 
and talked with him from day to day ; he has been 
my Consoler in sorrow, my Upholder in weakness, 
my Guide in perplexity, my Deliverer in tempta- 
tion ; when I wandered into the wilderness, and had 
hopelessly lost my way, it was he who sought and 
found me; when the dark cloud of condemnation 
was settling upon me it was he that rolled it way, 
and caused the sunshine of God's forgiving love to 
break in upon my soul; when I was struggling to 
free myself from the bondage of evil habit it was 
his hand that broke my fetters and brought me 
deliverance ; when, staggering under heavy burdens 
of care, I was about to sink in utter exhaustion, his 
everlasting arms were beneath me, and I arose from 
the dust with renewed strength to resum^e the 
onward march; when tempest-tossed on the sea of 
trouble, with the billows of sorrow sweeping over 
me, it was his voice that sounded through the 
storm, 'It is I, be not afraid' ; when the furnace 
of affliction through which I had to pass was heated 
sevenfold, it was his presence that stayed the fury 
of the flames; and when, in the lowliness of grief, 



130 THE PRESENCE 

I stood beside the grave of my beloved dead, it was 
his voice that sounded out of the heart of my deso- 
lation, saying, 'I am the resurrection, and the life : 
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet 
shall he live' ; v/hen this has been my experience ; 
when nothing in my life has been more real than 
the presence and power of the risen Christ, can 
you blame me if I refuse to be moved away from 
this rock-like foundation of assurance, upon which 
I have stood securely when life's fiercest storms 
have beat upon me ?" Faith like this does not stand or 
fall with the presumptive evidence of the authority 
of certain documents ; it rests upon the irrefutable 
witness of a man's own soul. ''He that believeth 
hath the witness in himself." 

The supreme evidence of religion is not in the 
Bible, but in ourselves. We do not believe in Christ 
because we find him revealed in the Bible; we 
believe in the Bible because we find in it a revela- 
tion of the Christ who has met the heart's deepest 
longings and the life's deepest needs. Our direct 
and personal experience of his life-giving power is 
more satisfactory than anything we can read about 
him in any book. Christian experience existed 
before the New Testament was written, and was 
at first independent of it; yet for those who have 
not known Christ after the flesh it cannot be 
divorced from it. To learn of the unseen Christ, 
from whose haunting presence no one ' can ever 
get away, we have to turn to the Gospels, in which 
the story of his temporal manifestation in the flesh 



AS IT NOW IS 131 

has been recorded. There we find what Christ is. 
In the Christ of history we find the Christ the 
vision of whose presence changes our night into 
day and speaks peace to the heart. The book that 
brings to us the knowledge of his person is to us 
the living Word of the living God, a message 
spoken by him directly to the heart. Hence we 
turn eagerly to it to learn more about him; and 
every conception of him that does not agree with 
what is written there we reject as false. Yet not 
even the Bible will we allow to come between us 
and the real and ever-living Christ. 

Beyond the sacred page I seek thee, Lord, 
My spirit pants for thee, O Living Word. 

Through the Word we must gO' to him personally, 
and have personal transactions with him before we 
can experience his saving and sustaining grace. 
In the Word he stands revealed to our adoring 
faith. But the Word is not Him; it is only the 
means of knowing him. To him we must go, that 
he may speak direct to our hearts, so that from 
being the Christ of history he may become the 
Christ of experience. 

During recent years the historical method of 
studying the life of Jesus has been followed. We 
have made a study of origins, going back to the 
beginning, and trying to put ourselves into the his- 
torical situation by which that life was compassed 
about. We have placed it in its proper historical 
background, and have looked at it as a normal 



132 th;e presence 

human life. From this method has come great 
gain. It has been enthusiastically averred that the 
real Jesus has been rediscovered. What we have 
really gained is a clearer conception of the human 
Jesus, the Man of Nazareth, the Friend and 
Brother of men, who had become to many a pale 
ecclesiastical abstraction. But the historical method 
is partial. It gives us only one side of a complex 
personality, about whom the full truth is not dis- 
covered until the Jesus of history has become the 
Christ of experience. The value of what he did 
when he was here among men lies in this, that it 
forms the means by which he is now understood, 
the means by which he now exerts his unique 
influence over us. We read of his holy, beneficent 
life, we read of his sacrificial death, and by them 
we learn what he is. In his earthly life the foun- 
dation of his redeeming work was laid; the path- 
way was prepared upon which the forces which 
make for righteousness were to run; the initial 
impulse was given to a movement of whose 
increase there is to be no end. What he then did 
he is now doing; what he then began he is now 
continuing by his touch upon the individual life. 
He is the living Mediator, the living Propitiator, 
the living Saviour. Men are saved by coming into 
personal contact with him now. As the Christ of 
history he is the object of devout contemplation; 
as the Christ of the future he is the object of hope; 
as the Christ of the present he is the quickener of 
spiritual life, the author of eternal salvation. 



AS IT NOW IS 133 

Why then should we expect him from afar when 
he is ever near, and ever pressing nearer, seeking 
to dwell within us, and to open the fountain of life 
in our hearts. In the reality of his presence our 
souls should rest, saying, 

"Why do I ask and question? 
He is ever coming to me, 
Morning, and noon, and evening. 
If I had but eyes to see; 

"And the daily load grows lighter, 
And the daily cares grow sweet; 
For the Master is near, the Master is here, 
I have only to sit at his feet." 

The self-evidencing power of his presence may 
be illustrated by Kipling's beautiful story entitled 
*'They," in which the father knows that it is his 
little dead child who has touched his hand softly, 
in the darkness from behind his chair, because of 
the sweet individual way about the touch that the 
father's heart remembered. And when in the dark- 
ness of our trouble the hand of the Christ touches 
us out of the unseen, will there not be something 
in the nature of that touch, something of such 
divine tenderness and sympathy as to bring to us 
the conviction that it is the touch of him whose 
hand once bore the print of the nails? 

II. The Outward Witness to the Presence 

If Christ has come again, if he has returned to 
earth, if he is really here, what are the evidences 



134 THE PRESENCE 

of his presence? Are there any visible signs by 
which his hidden presence can be detected? The 
answer to that question is: Certain things have 
been done, and are now being done, that require his 
presence and his direct action for their explanation 
Since the time at which he said he would return 
a beneficent power had been at work in the world ; 
the works which he did in the flesh have been per- 
petuated; a movement has developed which has 
turned the world upon an upward pathway. It is 
not a sufficient explanation to say that his influence 
still lives, that his memory is still a vital force; 
the things that are being done evidently show that 
this side the tomb Christ himself actually lives and 
works, exerting a saving and uplifting influence 
upon men and upon institutions. 

To every man death is the end of his earthly 
activity. When he dies his work is over, whether 
his task be completed or not. When Christ died 
his work had only begun. Death did not even make 
a break in it. When he rose again his activity 
merely took on a new form. The things which he 
"began both to do and to teach, until the day when 
he was taken up," he is now carrying on through 
the Holy Spirit. Everywhere there is in operation 
a mighty gracious energy by which his works are 
repeated, which furnishes evidence of his presence. 
His spirit is moving upon the hearts of men to 
guide the world to its destined end. He is behind 
all the great age movements; he is at the center 
of the new order which is slowly and painfully 



AS IT NOW IS 135 

evolving ; he is in every movement for social better- 
ment; in every industrial struggle for better con- 
ditions of living; in all the blind gropings of men 
after the ideal life which he has set before them. 
He is the mightiest force in the life of the world 
to-day. ''Every event is alive with his appearing. 
His presence is the most evident thing in the 
world." 

For evidence of the Presence we have therefore 
only to look around upon what he is now doing. 
His footsteps are easily traced ; his works are patent 
to all eyes. His mighty hand, that upward of 
eighteen hundred years ago turned the tide of his- 
tory, is guiding and controlling the affairs of men. 
The new evolutionary process which was set in 
motion when he was manifested in flesh has not 
spent its force. The new sun which then broke out 
upon the sky continues to shine in undiminished 
splendor; a new creative power of which he is the 
source is silently changing the whole face of the 
world. The long, dark night has ended ; the dawn of 
the new age has come ; the curse is slowly departing. 
Every passing day Christ is getting a firmer hold 
upon the world's heart. He is bringing in ''sweeter 
manners, purer laws." His teaching is gaining 
acceptance; his ethics are becoming the standard 
of human action ; his life is penetrating the lives of 
men; his love is melting the mighty iceberg of 
selfishness; his spirit is diffusing itself through 
human society, and is gradually making all things 
new. Those who see his transforming power every- 



136 THE PRESENCE 

where at work in human life desire no better evi- 
dence of his presence. 

By a similar process of reasoning the astronomer 
Adams discovered the planet Neptune before it 
had been seen by human eyes. He knew that there 
must be such a planet because its existence was 
necessary to the explanation of other undoubted 
facts. It rests with those who deny the presence 
of Christ to show how certain phenomena can be 
explained on any other ground than that he is 
now at work in the world. 

The early disciples believed most fervently that 
the Lord had returned, that he lived among them, 
and that he was their silent partner in all they 
undertook. It is said that after his ascension "they 
went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord 
working with them" (Mark i6. 20). To the Jews 
they declared that the miracles which they wrought 
were performed "in the name of Jesus Christ of 
Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised 
from the dead" (Acts 4. 10). All that they accom- 
plished they traced to his direct and continuous 
activity. 

Through his people the risen Christ still works. 
He is the invisible actor, they his visible agents. 
They are continuing his ministry, doing the very 
things that filled his hands when he was on earth. 
Under his inspiration and direction they are build- 
ing the walls of the temple of righteousness which he 
came to rear, and of which he merely laid the foun- 
dations. All their manifold ministries have their 



AS IT NOW IS 137 

source in the fountain of divine love which he has 
opened in their hearts. Hence the works that they 
do bear witness of him; they bear his mark; they 
manifest his glory. Not alone in the deeds they do, 
but also in the lives they live do Christians give 
evidence of the Presence. Onlookers still take 
knowledge of Christians that they have been with 
Jesus. They see the marks of his influence upon 
their characters. They see the same signs of his 
presence which a tree has to show of the presence 
of the sun when its quickening influence has pene- 
trated to its hidden roots, and the sap begins to 
flow, and the leaves begin to bud. "As some sweet 
perfume in a vase of clay pervades it with a fra- 
grance not its own," so the fragrance of his spirit 
pervades their lives. He is evidently at work upon 
them. They are "his workmanship," not his finished 
product however, for they are still in the making. 
In their lives is many a weakness, many a flaw. 
Their imperfection they themselves bewail, shed- 
ding over them in secret many a scalding tear. 
Yet the kingly rule of Christ is plainly visible in 
their lives. They have enthroned him in their 
heart of hearts. That he is molding their charac- 
ters is evident from their unconscious growth in 
every saintly grace; that they are living with him 
is evident from the fact that they are living like 
him; that he is living in them is evident from the 
fact that they are living for him. 

The thought that we are to "look for the signs 
of his living in the hearts of the children of rnen" 



138 THE PRESENCE 

has been a favorite one with the poets. Says Mary 
Lowe Dickinson: 

Wherever a soft hand falls soft on a wound or a woe; 
Wherever a peace or a pardon springs up to o'ermaster a 

foe; 
Wherever a tender heart's mercy outstretches to succor a 

need, 
Wherever springs healing for wounding, the Master is 

risen indeed. 

Whittier declares: 

That the dear Christ dwells not afar, 
The king of some remoter star, 
Listening at times with flattered ear 
To homage wrung from servile fear, 
But here amidst the poor and blind, 
The bound and suffering of our kind, 
In works we do, in prayers we pray. 
Life of our life he lives to-day. 

To the same effect are the Hnes of Dean Stanley : 

The Lord is come in every heart 
Where truth and mercy claim a part ; 
In every land where right is might, 
And deeds of darkness shun the light ; 
In every church where faith and love 
Lift earthward thoughts to things above, 
In every hol}^, happy home, 
We bless thee, Lord, that thou art come ! 

The Presence fills the whole of human life. 
When Christ ascended it was that he might "fill 
all things"; and because he is doing this it ought 
not to be difficult to find him. When a blind man 
is standing under the warm, vivifying rays of the 
sun he has no doubt of the sun's existence, even 



AS IT NOW IS 139 

although he does not see its light. And we have 
the same evidence for the presence of the unseen 
Christ. But the prime reason why we often fail 
to gain the evidence we seek is because we are 
looking for it in the spectacular and unwonted 
instead of looking for it where it was to be found 
in the days of his flesh — in the common haunts of 
men and in the things of the common life. In the 
recently discovered "Logia" are the words: "Raise 
the stone and there shalt thou find me ; cleave the 
wood and I am there." These words have been 
variously interpreted, but perhaps the most plau- 
sible interpretation is that they refer to the presence 
of Christ in the common things of life. 

Here in my workshop where I toil 

Till head and hands are well-nigh spent, 
Out on the road where dust and soil 

Fall thick on garments worn and rent, 
Or in the kitchen where I bake 

The bread that little children eat, 
He comes, his hand of strength I take, 

And every lonely task grows sweet. 

— Henry van Dyke. 

That he is to be found in the sacrificial offering 
is one of the commonplaces of religion. The altar 
has always been the meeting place between God 
and man. To the Jews as they entered the door 
of the tabernacle was the pledge of Jehovah given : 
"There will I meet with the children of Israel, and 
the tabernacle shall be sanctified by my glory" 



I40 THE PRESEMCE 

(Exod. 29. 43). And in the Christian assemblies 
the worshipers take up the song: 

The King himself comes near 

And feasts his saints to-day; 
Here we may sit and see him here, 

And love, and praise, and pray. 

The truth, however, to which special attention 
is now demanded, is that Christ is to be found in 
the humblest home just as truly as in the most 
gorgeous temple. With his love for man un- 
changed, he could not remain in heaven listening 
to the harpings of the angels, nor could he remain 
in earthly temples listening to the praises of the 
saints, when he was so sorely needed among the 
sinning and suffering children of men. The place 
to find a Saviour is by the side of a sinner. 

A gentleman once called upon a celebrated phy- 
sician. "Is your father at home?" he asked the 
little boy who answered the door. "No," was the 
reply. "Where do you think I could find him?" 
"Well," he said, with a thoughtful air, "you've got 
to look for some place where people are sick or 
hurt, or something like that, for he is sure to be 
somewhere helping somebody." And where should 
we expect to find the Saviour of sinners but down 
here among them in the midst of their strife, their 
helper in temptation, their inspirer in the hour 
when the path of duty is trod with leaden feet, their 
faithful ally when bankrupt of hope because the 
door of honest toil will not open to their most 
importunate knocking. He is by no means absent 



AS IT NOW IS 141 

from them in their happier hours. He is present 
at weddings as well as at funerals ; but it is where 
there is want and woe that he is most needed, and 
he is principally to be found. 

'Tis here, O pitying Christ, where thee I seek — 
Here where the strife is fiercest, where the sun 
Beats down upon the highway thronged with men, 
And in the raging mart. 

— Richard W. Gilder. 

And it is because men do not expect to find him in 
these humble and lowly places that they so often 
pass him without recognition. 

O dreamers dreaming that your faith is keeping 

All service free from blot, 
Christ daily walks your streets, sick, suffering, weeping. 

And ye perceive him not. 

To find the unseen Christ we must go where he is 
and share in his work. Often we fail to find him 
in our beautiful churches, where, seated upon soft 
cushions, we shut out the cries of the suffering, and 
give ourselves up to selfish delights ; but when 
we go where sin and sorrow abound, where the 
pinched face of want bends over unrequited toil, 
where the bitter cry of the friendless and forlorn 
dies away unheard, where there are heavy burdens 
to unbind, where there are bleeding hearts to com- 
fort, where there are fainting hearts to succor, there 
will we find him. To those who go where he goes, 
who look upon the world's squalor and misery 
through his eyes, and who seek to participate with 
him in the service of man will be given a convinc- 



142 THE PRESENCE 

ing evidence of the Presence which is denied to 
other men. 

III. The Presence in the Church 

I. The Center of its Corporate Life. The church, 
according to the New Testament conception of it, 
may be defined as **That holy society of beHevers 
in Jesus Christ, which he founded, of which he is 
the Head, and in which he dwells by his Spirit." 
Outwardly and visibly viewed, the church is a 
human organization with rules for its government, 
officers for the directing of its affairs, and ordi- 
nances for its sustenance and perpetuation. In- 
wardly and invisibly viewed, the church is a divine 
creation, a spiritual body to which the life of Christ 
is communicated, and through which that life is 
mediated to the world. 

The vital core from which the church visible 
and invisible has grown is disclosed in the Master's 
words, "Where two or three are gathered together 
in my name, there am I in the midst of them" 
(Matt. i8. 20). Uhi Christus ibi ecclesia: "Where 
Christ is, there is the church." Equally true is it 
that where the church is, there is Christ. He is 
ever in the midst of those who gather together "into 
his name," making their collective life a center of 
common attraction and a sphere of mutual fellow- 
ship. These words are not a promise for the ful- 
fillment of which we are to wait, but a pledge in 
the fulfillment of which we are now to rejoice. 
Jesus does not say, "Where two or three are gath- 



AS IT NOW IS 143 

ered together in my name, there shall I be in the 
midst of them," but, "there I am in the midst of 
them." Where two or three draw together, and 
are drawn together unto Christ, he is beside them, 
making himself one in all they seek to attain. 

In the days of persecution, when their conven- 
ticles were broken up, and they were hunted like 
partridges on the mountains, the Scotch Covenanters 
were encouraged by their leader, Alexander Peden, 
to talk face to face with Christ. *Tor," said he, "if 
there be one of you, he will be the second; and if 
there be two, he will be the third, and ye shall not 
want company." And with him in their company 
there would be all the elements of a church. Accord- 
ing to Lightfoot, the Rabbins say that where two 
or- three are sitting in judgment Shebanai is in 
the midst of them. And so where two or three are 
met together to worship in Christ's name, or to con- 
sider the interests of his kingdom, he is in the midst 
of them to inspire them in their devotions and to 
guide them in their deliberations. Instead, then, 
of praying to him to fulfill his promise and meet 
with them, they are to fall back upon his absolute 
and unrepealed pledge, saying: "The Lord has 
surely kept his tryst, and is now in the midst of 
this assembly. This is none other than the spirit's 
meeting place with him, the home of the soul, the 
anteroom of heaven." 

As to how the Christ, who is in heaven, can also 
be present on earth with his own, we need not 
stop to inquire. It is enough to know that the keep- 



144 THE PRESENCE 

ing of his word involved no impossibility, inas- 
much as omnipresence is an attribute of divinity. 
There are some things which lie beyond the reach 
of human comprehension, and this is one of them. 
The mystery of the universal presence of Christ 
we can never hope to fathom; but the fact need 
not, on that account, be to any of us the less real. 
That he is everywhere and at all times present with 
those who meet to call upon his name — with those 
in China simultaneously with those in America — 
his declaration plainly implies; and surely in his 
word we have sufficient ground for faith. 

The presence in the church of its Founder and 
Former is that which marks it off from all other 
organizations. He is in it as the soul is in the 
body. Its very existence is a proof that he has 
risen from the dead; its continual existence is the 
proof of his continued presence within it as its 
informing life. All its movements of thought and 
activity are from him; all its power for good is 
from him; in all its gatherings he is present — 
although of his presence there is no outward sign 
whatever, no Shekinah appearing as an aid to faith. 
Of the reality of his unseen Presence, which so 
profoundly moves their hearts, the worshipers are 
no less fully assured than they are of the presence 
of their fellow worshipers. Into the ear of the 
listening Christ they direct their prayers; by his 
sympathy they are soothed; by his love they are 
inspired; and as they come forth from his secret 
chamber others, detecting on their garments the 



AS IT NOW IS 145 

aroma of heavenly grace, take knowledge of them 
that they have been with Jesus. 

According to the New Testament conception of 
it, the church is a very simple thing. Strictly 
speaking, it is not something which Christ formally 
instituted, but something which grew from the 
seed which he planted. The word which Jesus used 
for "church," is in the margin of the Revised Ver- 
sion translated "congregation." And that is what 
it means: the congregation or assembly of those 
who, impelled by the need of fellowship, have come 
together upon the confession of his name. Har- 
nack puts first among the features which he assigns 
to the primitive Christian society "the recognition 
of Jesus as living Lord." The bond that bound 
the members of this society together was loyalty 
to a common Master, personal and absolute surren- 
der to his authority. They claimed the right to 
immediate access to his presence; they went direct 
to him for orders. Like their Puritan successors, 
they felt the impact of invisible things, and lived, 
as John Richard Green, the historian, has said, 
"so close to the Source of Purity that the life of 
common man seemed sin." In their experience the 
promise was fulfilled: "I will dwell in them, and 
walk in them, . . . and I will be their God, 
and they shall be my people" (2 Cor. 6. 16). 

It is the presence of Christ, realized by the Holy 
Spirit, that keeps the light of truth burning within 
the church. All the light that comes from the 
church is the outshining of his inshining. He walks 



146 THE PRESENCE 

in the midst of the church as the priest walked in 
the midst of the seven golden lamps, keeping them 
trimmed, and feeding them with oil, that they 
might burn with a clear and steady light. Absolute 
dependence upon him for enlightenment is essential 
to the highest life of the church. When that is 
surrendered the gravest evils follow. It has been 
affirmed that Newman was driven into the Roman 
Catholic Church from a deep distrust of reason. 
What he really doubted was not so much the suffi- 
ciency of reason as a guide as the sufficiency of 
the unseen Christ as a guide. He could not see 
how it was possible for Christ to control the affairs 
of his church without some outwardly imposed 
form of authority. An advance movement from 
the Anglican half-way house of centralized author- 
ity to the Roman Catholic final goal of a single and 
supreme authority became inevitable if the premise 
which he had accepted was to be carried to its 
logical conclusion. The conflict between spiritual 
and temporal authority which was fought out in 
the soul of Newman is being waged to-day over a 
wide area. And well will it be if in the midst of 
the smoke of battle the momentous issue involved 
is kept clearly in view; for it is none other than 
that of sight versus faith, bondage versus freedom, 
visible leadership versus invisible leadership, the 
headship of a fallible man or church versus the 
headship of the infallible Christ. The substitution 
of temporal headship for spiritual headship is the 
great apostasy; and it can come only as the result 



AS IT NOW IS 147 

of the atrophy of the faith of the church in the pres- 
ence and leadership of her unseen Lord. 

It is demanded of the church of to-day that she 
give a more definite acknowledgment of the 
unseen Christ as her actual Ruler and Leader, a 
larger recognition of his sovereignty, a more com- 
plete surrender to his authority. He has made 
himself dependent upon her for the expression and 
exercise of his sovereign power. The authority 
given to him he has delegated to his people. Into 
their hands he has put the keys of the kingdom. 
They are to sit down with him on his throne ; they 
are to declare his judgments ; they are to administer 
the affairs of his kingdom ; they are to do his work ; 
they are to be to him hands and feet and mouth; 
they are to go for him into the abodes of poverty 
and vice; they are to carry the light of his gospel 
into the dark places of the earth; they are to put 
themselves completely at his service, allowing him 
to make what use of them he pleases ; they are, as 
his representatives, to express his mind, to do his 
will, and to manifest his presence in the world. 

It is not enough for the church to rest in a 
historic connection with the Lord of the past; she 
must live in actual connection with the Lord of 
the present. It is not enough for her to see what 
he has done for her in the ages past, or what he is 
going to do for her in the ages to come; she must 
see what he is doing for her now. To lay hold 
upon the fact of his indwelling presence, to behold 
him at the head of his sacramental host, leading it 



148 THE PRESENCE 

on to victory, will bring a new influx of power. 
When the noble four hundred Scotch ministers, 
surrendering their livings, marched out of the 
Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, taking for their 
watchword, "The Crown rights of Jesus Christ,'* 
and reaffirming the original position of the Scottish 
Church, that "the Church of Christ is spiritual, 
not having a temporal head on earth, but only 
Christ, the one King and Governor of his church," 
they kindled a fire of evangelical life in Scotland 
which, by God's grace, burns until this day. The 
truth for which they so heroically stood cannot 
be too warmly defended and enforced. 

There are those who see in the present day "a 
growing sense of dependence upon the unseen pres- 
ence and effective grace of Christ, which promises 
a spiritual awakening of large and enduring 
results." If that is a true reading of the signs in 
the ecclesiastical sky, the future is surely full of 
hope, for nothing could conduce more to the suc- 
cess of Christianity than a return on the part of 
the church to the simple faith in the presence of 
the unseen Christ in her midst, as her Ruler and 
Guide. Just in proportion to the hold which this 
great truth gets upon Christian hearts will the 
church somnolent and discomfited be transformed 
into the church militant and triumphant. A recog- 
nition of the living Christ will make a living church, 
a recognition of the working Christ will make a 
working church, a recognition of the conquering 
Christ will make a conquering church. 



AS IT NOW IS 149 

2. In the Eucharist. The presence of Christ in 
the Eucharist has been called ''the Real Presence" ; 
and so it is in a distinctive sense. By the Eucharist 
the living Christ is kept before the eyes of his 
church. That this was the object of this sacrament 
is evident from the words of Jesus to his disciples, 
"This do in remembrance of me" ; that is, "By this 
means keep my memory green while I am absent 
from you." Paul makes this addition, "For as 
often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye 
proclaim the Lord's death till he come" (i Cor. 
II. 26). The qualifying words, "till he come," 
evidently imply that by the Lord's coming a new 
signification or "revelation value" was to be given 
to the ordinance of the Lord's Supper; that up to 
the time of his coming it was to proclaim the death 
of one who had gone, but that after his return it 
was to speak in a new sense of one who had come. 

By the coming of the Lord Paul meant his 
second coming. Of that there cannot be the slight- 
est doubt. The speedy coming of the Lord was, at 
the beginning of his Christian life, the uppermost 
thought in his mind. By his coming again the end 
for which Christ died was to be completed. The 
shedding of his blood upon the cross would have 
availed nothing had it not been followed by his 
resurrection and return. When he returned the 
Supper was to become the expression of his con- 
tinued life. No longer was it merely to refresh 
the memory concerning the Christ who once lived 
and died on the earth, but it was to be the token 



150 THE PRESENCE 

that the Christ who Hved and died had come again 
to hve forever with his people. No longer was it 
to be the picturesque memorial of an absent Christ, 
but the means of contact and fellowship with the 
Hving Christ. In a word, it was henceforth to be 
a sacrament of life rather than a festival of death. 

It was his failure to see the changed significance 
of this ordinance that led Emerson to reject it. He 
could not believe that Jesus meant to impose a 
memorial feast upon the whole world. Had he 
seen in this simple rite, not an audacious attempt 
on the part of Jesus to perpetuate his name, but a 
helpful way of perpetuating fellowship with him- 
self, the reason for its observance would have been 
more apparent. 

The position is taken by a certain class of Chris- 
tian scholars that Jesus did not formally institute 
the Supper as a perpetual ordinance; but that its 
continuous observance is due to the natural prompt- 
ings of the disciples to express their love and 
loyalty in symbols which Jesus himself had em- 
ployed. Others, coming nearer the truth, think that 
its perpetual observance "is due to the disclosures 
made by our Lord after his resurrection." Its 
formal appointment is evidently implied in the 
words, "This do in remembrance of me"; but new 
reasons were undoubtedly given for its observance 
after his resurrection. When first celebrated it 
was a parting meal in which Jesus participated. To 
his disciples he said, "With desire I have desired to 
eat this passover with you before I suffer." The 



AS IT NOW IS 151 

meaning which it had before he suffered was the 
only one which then it could possibly possess, but 
after he was glorified its meaning was to be 
widened so as to make it the sign of his real and 
abiding presence. 

At the very time when Jesus inaugurated the 
Supper he intimated in the plainest terms to his 
disciples that that was not to be the last occasion 
upon which he was to meet with them. Death was 
not to rob them of him. Although about to leave 
them, the fallen threads of their fellowship would 
ere long again be taken up. The Supper of which 
they partook together was something more than a 
farewell feast; it was also a pledge of future 
reunion, of restored and continued fellowship. The 
parting cup of which they drank together was to 
give place to a cup of unending communion. Fore- 
seeing his resurrection and return, Jesus said to his 
disciples, ''I will not drink henceforth of this fruit 
of the vine, until that day when I drink it new 
with you in my Father's kingdom" (Matt. 26. 29). 
By the "Father's kingdom" he does not mean the 
final abode of the blessed, which lies beyond the 
grave, but the kingdom which was about to be 
established upon earth. In the Father's kingdom 
fellowship would be resumed on a higher plane. 
The eating and drinking of the present would pass 
over into spiritual communion. The Lord's return 
would be the occasion for festal joy. With his 
disciples he would drink the new wine of spiritual 
fellowship, thus bringing the Supper to its final 



152 THE PRESENCE 

fulfillment in the reunion of the church with her 
restored Lord. It was this sublime assurance that 
made the farewell feast "the bread of comfort and 
the cup of couoolation" to the sorrowing disciples. 
But while in the development of the doctrine of 
the Eucharist the idea of the Lord's presence was 
to become the prominent one, it was not to be the 
exclusive one. The memorial idea was still to be 
conserved and carried forward; albeit it was to be 
put in a new setting. The Lord's death was to be 
shown forth to the world in this symbolic and prac- 
tical manner as the means of human redemption; 
but it was to be shown forth as the death of One 
who in dying conquered death, and who is alive 
forevermore. In the Roman Catholic Church the 
celebration of the mass is an acted parable which 
keeps before the thought of the people the efficacy 
of the Lord's death, and in its frequent repetition 
is found the secret of the power of that church over 
the popular mind. But by Roman Catholics and 
Protestants alike the Lord's death is set forth so 
exclusively as to obscure the fact of his presence. 
The thought of the celebrant has been made to rest 
in the spectacle of a suffering, bleeding, dying 
Christ, instead of going on from that to the thought 
of a risen, living, victorious Christ. The two must 
go together, but the emphasis ought to be put on 
the latter. The central idea in the Supper is not 
any longer to be made that of commemoration, but 
of communion; not the remembrance of the dead 
Christ, but communion with the living Christ; not 



AS IT NOW IS 153 

the looking back to the Christ who once visited this 
earth in the guise of mortal flesh, but the looking 
up into the face of the Christ who has returned in 
the Spirit, and who is present in the bread and wine, 
that in them and through them he might give him- 
self to us. 

That this was Paul's view is evident from the 
words, "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it 
not a communion [literally, a participation] of the 
blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is 
it not a communion [a participation] of the body 
of Christ?" (i Cor. 10. 16). Apart from the Pres- 
ence how could there be communion? If Christ 
be not risen, and if he is not personally present, 
fellowship with him is impossible. 

This is also the view which John presents in his 
Gospel, which contains the latest apostolic develop- 
ment of Christian thought. The blood of Jesus is 
not merely something shed for us, but something 
received by us. "Except ye eat the flesh of the 
Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life 
in yourselves" (John 6. 53). Christ himself is to 
be received, not corporeally but spiritually; not 
by the mouth of the body but by the mouth of the 
soul. He is to become the food and life-blood of the 
soul to all who receive him. 

Any explanation of this mystery must necessarily 
be only partial. The theory of the ubiquity of the 
body of the glorified Christ, which Luther pro- 
pounded to support his view of the Eucharist, is 
far from satisfactory. By obtruding the idea of 



154 THE PRESENCE 

bald literalism into the region of the spiritual it 
substitutes a greater mystery for a lesser. The 
same is true of the Roman doctrine of transubstan- 
tiation, which interprets a spiritual fact in a carnal 
sense. The one thing that is clear is that the Christ 
who is present in the Eucharist, that he may 
through its sacred emblems communicate his very 
life to our souls, is a spiritual Christ, with whom 
our spirits can meet and mingle, because of their 
kinship with his. 

The Lord's Supper was founded upon the pass- 
over, but it is something more than "a transfigured 
paschal feast." When the passover was taken over 
into Christianity it received a new and enlarged 
meaning. It stood not for national deliverance 
through the blood of the paschal lamb, but for 
spiritual deliverance through the Lamb of God, who 
was sacrificed for us. In the return of Christ the 
glorious fullness of its spiritual significance was 
revealed. From that time forth it became a great 
object lesson to the world, teaching men that the 
one who died for human sin is now present to 
deliver ; that from being a precious memory he has 
become a living and life-giving Presence. 

The practical conclusion, then, to which we are 
brought is that since the coming of Christ in the 
Spirit it is the privilege of the collective body of 
his people to enjoy through the Supper the sense 
of his actual presence. The value of this rite, as 
an aid to faith, is that it brings the reality of his 
presence into view. It proclaims that he is really 



AS IT NOW IS 153 

here ; that his presence is not figurative nor imagin- 
ary, but real and efficacious; that the bread and 
wine, instead of being mere signs to assist the mem- 
ory, are forms under which Christ offers himself 
as the true food of our souls. In a word, it is not 
a funeral feast, but a feast of joyous fellowship; 
not a commemorative rite, but an operative rite ; not 
a memorial of an absent friend, but the outward 
seal of his unseen presence ; not the act of mourn- 
ing over the dead, but fellowship close and personal 
with the living. In the words of Dr. W. R. Dale, 
"The ordinance represents a permanent relation 
between Christ and those who trust in him, a per- 
petual participation in the divine life, so that he 
becomes the life of our life, the sinew of our 
strength, the inexhaustible fountain of our joy." 

If Christ has come, he is present ; if he is present, 
we can find him at his table; but if he has not come, 
how can he be present? and if he is not present, 
how can we find him at his table, or anywhere else 
on this desolate earth ? That he has coi le is the 
only valid ground that exists for his real presence ; 
that he is present is the only reason why we may 
meet him and receive the fullness of his sacrificial 
life. 

His presence is realized in believing souls who 
look through the symbols in which he is pre- 
sented, and, seeing him, receive him into themselves 
by an act of spiritual appropriation. 

Such ever bring him where they come, 
And, going, take him to their home. 



156 THE PRESENCE 

But of him they dare claim no monopoly; their 
most hallowed moments of fellowship simply con- 
firm the truth of his abiding presence; and their 
united life, of which he is ceaselessly the source, 
is recognized as having its ultimate goal in the 
realization of the onene«« of God and men expressed 
in the life of the world. 

S' At the Door of the Church. The church 
in which Christ perpetually abides is not the 
outward, visible organization, but the invisible 
church composed of believing souls. From the 
visible church he is often excluded. The story is 
told of a man who went to a certain fashionable 
church and met with a cold welcome. Everyone 
seemed to look askance and make him feel that he 
was an intruder. "Whose church is this?" he 
timidly asked a gentleman who sat near. "Jesus 
Christ's," was the reply. "O! is he in this morn- 
ing?" was the rejoinder. Alas that the absence 
of the spirit of Christ from those who confess his 
name should so often afford ground for questioning 
whether or not he has a place within his own 
church ! 

In the book of Revelation there is a striking 
representation of Christ as outside of his profess- 
ing church. Making his final appeal to his slumber- 
ing church before the breaking of the storm which 
the book of Revelation describes, the risen Christ 
exclaims, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock: 
if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will 
come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with 



AS IT NOW IS 157 

me" (Rev. 3. 20). The force and meaning of this 
text are completely lost if it is taken to describe 
the approach of Christ to the individual soul. The 
picture presented is that of Christ at the door of 
his church. He finds the door shut and barred 
against him. The Laodicean church, with all its 
loud profession and self-conceit, had denied him 
a place in its midst. A Christless church! A 
church from which Christ is excluded! A church 
in which Christ's will is not consulted, nor his ways 
followed; a democratic church, in which the spirit 
of independence has degenerated into independence 
of Christ; a worldly church, outwardly prosperous 
but spiritually impotent; a self-satisfied church, 
which wanted nothing and needed everything — 
such is the church before whose closed doors Christ 
is represented as standing. 

His action bespeaks his interest. He takes the 
initiative. With condescending love he comes to 
the church from which he has been expelled and 
sues for readmission. He is urgent and importu- 
nate. To wake his slumbering church he uses 
hands and voice. He knocks and speaks. He calls 
attention to his presence and then tells his errand. 
But, great as is his desire to get inside his church, 
he will not force an entrance. The bolt has been 
fastened from within, and the hand that placed it 
there must withdraw it. A free response must be 
given. For, as he will not stay in any church 
where he is not wanted, he will not come to any 
church where he is not welcomed. 



IS8 THE PRESENCE 

From the church he turns to the individual. 
When the church as a whole will not receive him 
he says: ''If any man hear my voice and open the 
door, I will come in to him and sup with him, and 
he with me." The opening of the heart is man's, 
the entering into it is his. He enters the spirit- 
home the moment its doors are thrown open, bring- 
ing with him spiritual entertainment. The guest 
becomes the host, for when Christ comes he comes 
as a King, bringing his own rich entertainment 
with him, and sharing it with us. 

In times of spiritual declension seldom is there 
a concerted movement on the part of the church to 
receive Christ. A work of revival generally begins 
with the coming of Christ into the lives of solitary 
saints. And, happily, if there are churches that can 
be satisfied with everything but Christ, there are 
always to be found souls who cannot be satisfied 
with anything but Christ. They pine when he is 
absent from them. They long for a realizing sense 
of his presence. They want him in their business 
and in their pleasures; they want to make him 
regnant in the whole circle of their social activities. 
And when in response to his appeal they open the 
door and let him in, their spiritual life receives 
instant enlargement, and they become new centers 
of spiritual power within the church to whose fel- 
lowship they belong. 

The overshadowing idea in this dramatic repre- 
sentation of the present attitude of the unseen 
Christ is his unquenchable desire to gain possession 



AS IT NOW IS 159 

of his church, that he may make it pure, unselfish, 
and fruitful, by filling it with the fullness of his 
life. He knows how beggarly will be its condition 
without nim. For its own welfare he seeks to con- 
trol its life. He seeks to bless it and to use it; or, 
rather, he seeks to bless it by using it for ends the 
highest and noblest. With the same longing desire 
with which he seeks to gain possession of his 
church which he has purchased for himself, he 
seeks to get entire possession of the hearts which 
he has formed for himself. Happy the church, 
happy the heart that opens to him ! Heaven begins 
when he is received. 



PART VIII 
WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 



i6i 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 

If Christ is here, what is he doing? What does 
his presence imply ? What are his present relations 
to men? What is he now doing for them? Impor- 
tant as it is to know what he has done in the past, 
and to know what he has promised to do in the 
future, still more important is it to know what 
he is doing for us now. 

The work which the post-incarnate Christ is here 
to accomplish is one, yet manifold. It can be looked 
at from a great variety of aspects. 

I. He Is Here to Save 
This must be his main mission. A French 
philosopher irreverently asks, "Christ has come; 
when Cometh salvation?" We answer: Salvation 
has come because the Saviour has come. He is 
here delivering souls from the power of sin. His 
strong right arm is striking off the fetters of evil 
habit. It is distinctly stated that his Second Advent 
was to be for the purpose of salvation. The promise 
runs: "He having been once offered to bear the 
sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from 
sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation" 
(Heb. 9. 28). His feet follow every wandering 
soul. He comes to seek and to save that which is 
lost. He stands by every sinner's side, waiting for 
him to fling himself into his outstretched arms. 
163 



i64 THE PRESENCE 

If he had not risen from the dead, and returned 
to earth, he could not have brought salvation to 
men. His death would have availed nothing if he 
had not possessed the power to take up again the 
life which he had laid down. His shed blood 
derives its efficacy from his restored life. A pres- 
ent deliverer must be a living deliverer. To find 
the Christ who is mighty to save we are not to visit 
his tomb. The tomb is empty. "Come see the place 
where the Lord lay" — not the place where he lies. 
Why seek the living among the dead? The Lord 
whom ye seek stands beside you. Behold him as 
your Saviour and the midnight of your gloom will 
be turned into the glory of a new born day. 

A Moslem who, after a careful study of the New 
Testament, became a convert to Christianity, when 
asked why he wanted to be baptized, replied, "Jesus 
is alive, and Mohammed is dead; how can a dead 
man save?" He was right. Saving efficacy be- 
longs only to a living Saviour; and it is because 
the atoning, redeeming Christ has not passed beyond 
human reach that sinful men can experience his 
saving power. 

To be real and vital, faith must, therefore, take 
hold of the glorious truth that Christ is now alive. 
The quality of faith is determined by its object. 
Faith in a living Christ is a living faith. A mere 
historical faith, that is, a faith which has regard 
to the record of what Christ has done, gives an 
historical Christ; but a faith which has regard to 
what Christ is now doing gives the Christian's Christ 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 165 

— the Christ of universal Christian experience. 
* The former faith differs from the latter as a botani- 
cal name differs from a living flower. Yet it must 
not be forgotten that historical faith forms the 
basis of saving faith. The Christ who died is the 
Christ who lives ; the Christ who loved is the Christ 
who loves; the Christ who went about doing good 
is the Christ who is now everywhere doing good; 
the Christ who came and vanished is the Christ 
who is here to-day saving men from sin and from 
ignoble ends. He is living, active, potential, effec- 
tive, suflicient. 

We have no right to speak of the saving work 
of Christ as finished. Only on its Godward side 
was it completed, when upon the cross he bowed 
his head and gave up the ghost. On its manward 
side it still goes on, and will go on as long as there 
is sin in the world. He has not got through with 
a single human soul, much less with the world at 
large. The kingdom which he at last delivers to 
the Father will be a kingdom redeemed from the 
curse of sin. 

It is said that men are saved by the work of 
Christ, meaning by that the work which he accom- 
plished on earth. Ought it not, rather, to be said 
that men are saved by Christ through the work 
accomplished on earth — the work consummated in 
his death upon the cross? The atonement is a 
method of personal influence. Life is imparted 
through truth. Revelation is for redemption. The 
written Word is a direct attempt on the part of 



i66 THE PRESENCE 

God to influence men. The manifestation of holy, 
suffering, atoning love in the life and death of 
Jesus is for the purpose of drawing men unto him- 
self. Religion, which is at bottom the personal 
influence of God upon man, is the same in nature, 
although not in degree, as the influence of man upon 
men. In no other way can Christ save than through 
the power of his personal influence. And whatever 
be the means by which that influence is conveyed, 
it is Christ himself, the living, personal, and present 
Christ, who saves. 

This view is corroborated by the experience of 
men in conversion. Every one who is saved 
ascribes his salvation to the personal influence of 
Christ. He heard of what Christ had done for 
him. The story of the earthly life of Christ brought 
into view his wondrous love. He beheld Christ 
dying upon the cross to take away his sins. But 
his thoughts quickly passed from the dead to the 
living Christ. He saw him at his side, as a present 
Saviour. He did not rest upon some abstract thing 
called his work ; he rested upon Christ himself. He 
found a Saviour, and in him he found salvation. 
He found the Atoner, and in him he found at-one- 
ment. He came to the living Christ, had personal 
contact with him, personal experience of his saving 
power. As he looked upon him he felt like the 
Knight of the Round Table, who said, 

"The sweetest vision of the Holy Grail 
Drove me from all vain glories, rivalries, 
And earthly heats." 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 167 

This is the vision which brought salvation to Saul 
of Tarsus. It is the vision which brings salvation 
to every one who beholds it. A striking modern 
instance of its power is found in the case of Pastor 
Hsi. Although a scholar, and a man of influence, 
he had become an opium slave. One day a New 
Testament was given him, and he retired to read it. 
So fascinated was he that he sank upon his knees 
still reading, when he became conscious of a 
strange mystical power around him, which grew 
into an overpowering sense of the presence of 
Christ. Suddenly the flower of faith burst open, 
and he exclaimed, "He has enthralled me, and I 
am his forever." For anyone to behold the vision 
of that face of grace is to become his everlasting 
thrall. 

"O, lole," said one of the beautiful princesses of 
Attica, "how did you know that Hercules was a 
god?" "Because I was content," was the reply, 
"the moment my eyes rested upon him. He con- 
quered whether he stood, or walked, or sat." 

H. He Is Here to Heal 

In the days of his flesh Jesus went about "healing 
all manner of disease and sickness among the 
people." When those who were sick came to him, 
after every other resource had been exhausted, "he 
had compassion on them, and healed them." He 
stood in the midst of this sin-stricken and disease- 
ridden world as an open fountain of life and power, 
bringing the saving health of God into such intimate 



i68 THE PRESENCE 

and effectual contact with men as to accomplish 
results over which the wise ones of the world have 
ever since been puzzled, but upon which humble 
believers have looked with reverential awe, as 
affording incontestable proof that God has indeed 
visited his people. 

After his departure the apostles performed 
miracles of healing in his name, and in his power. 
The explanation which Peter gives of the healing 
of the lame man at the gate of the temple which 
was called Beautiful covers every similar case. 
"Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this man? or 
why fasten ye your eyes on us, as though by our 
own power or godliness we had made him to walk ? 
. . . By faith in his name hath his name made 
this man strong, whom ye behold and know: yea, 
the faith which is through him hath given him this 
perfect soundness in the presence of you all" (Acts 
3. 12-16). The apostles attributed every particle 
of healing power which they exercised to the power 
of the risen Christ working through them. They 
were living dynamos, charged with a force not their 
own — a force which they themselves explained as 
coming from Christ, and as an evidence of his 
continued activity in the spiritual sphere. It was 
his presence with them and in them that made them 
the conquerors of disease. 

The healing ministry of Christ still goes on. Out 
of the unseen he continues to operate upon this 
diseased and disordered world. From him power 
to heal is constantly going forth. "His touch has 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 169 

still its ancient power." He is to-day "bearing our 
infirmities and carrying our sicknesses." His 
mighty unseen personality radiates life-giving 
power. 

The healing of the seamless dress 

Is by our beds of pain ; 
We touch him in life's throng and press, 
And we are whole again. 

In this world into which sin and sickness have 
entered there is a power working for repair, a 
power which is seeking to restore all things to the 
divine order from which they have fallen. Scientists 
speak of that power as a vis medicatrix natura; 
that is, a power in nature working for health. 
Although every breath of air, every drop of water, 
every mouthful of food contains germs of disease, 
health is maintained because this power for health 
is working to neutralize them. If a finger is cut, 
or a bone broken, the power for health rushes to 
the spot to repair the damage. Upon the constant 
operation of this power all who labor for the 
removal of disease can confidently reckon. Of the 
working of this recuperative power the ancient Jew 
caught a glimpse when he spoke of God as the 
health of man's countenance, and his saving health 
as being for all nations. He saw that all health 
is from the original, fontal source of life, and that 
hence anyone who is healed is divinely healed. Dr. 
Worcester testifies of this when he says, "It is 
always the power of God that effects a cure, whether 
the means employed be medicine or miracle." 



170 THE PRESENCE 

Now, it is in harmony with the established order 
of things that this power for health should widen 
its scope as man was able to take advantage of it, 
and that when it came to its fullness in the Christ 
it should take its place within the operation of 
unfolding law. Jesus was the pleroma, the fullness 
of divine power ; his works of healing were simply 
the attestation of the fact that in him was the 
Presence fully manifested. And now that he is 
in the unseen realm, we have the same evidence 
that he possesses divine power in the works which 
he is producing. As the one who before his coming 
in the flesh stood in organic union with the race; 
as the one who by his coming in the flesh revealed 
the nature of the Presence which had always 
brooded over the world, he has since his resurrec- 
tion been seeking to bring to fulfillment in the 
spiritual sphere all that was outwardly manifested 
in his human life. There is no change in his work 
except in its conditions. It is larger, deeper, and 
more effective. As the Infinite Christ he is the 
Infinite Power working for health. With him the 
Presence found in nature, in the world, in man, and 
in the Christ of history is identified. He is the 
abiding Presence, immanent in all things, a living, 
redeeming reality, flooding the soul with strength, 
healing the body of its diseases, reducing to 
harmony life's discords, soothing frayed nerves, 
calming troubled hearts, and bringing the entire 
man into perfect oneness with the divine will and 
with the divine order. To come into touch with 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 171 

him is to come into touch with the Infinite; it is 
to tap the hidden fountain of divine energy, which) 
flowing into the soul, makes its possessor "every 
whit whole." 

III. He Is Here to Comfort 

The three evils which exist in the world, for the 
removal of which the living Redeemer is ever at 
work, are sin, sickness, and sorrow. Sin is the 
tap root from which sickness and sorrow grow; 
until it is eradicated they are bound to exist. And 
while they exist they are by a divine alchemy 
transmuted into redemptive agencies. That is the 
reason why Jesus did not cure all sickness or 
remove all trouble from the world. His healing 
ministry was limited, and incidental to his larger 
and deeper spiritual ministry. It is so still. All 
sickness is not cured; all trouble is not removed; 
but when deliverance is denied help is always given ; 
when the evil remains he gives grace to bear It, 
and to profit by it. And, since the Consoler never 
leaves us alone in our trouble. 

Why do we worry about the road 

With its hill or deep ravine? 
In a dismal path, or a heavy load 

We are helped by hands unseen. 

Through all the Christian centuries there have 
appeared a succession of holy martyrs, each one 
of whom has died confessing his faith in the Divine 
Presence. 



172 THE PRESENCE 

As in that flaming fire he trod 
One walked with him in glorious form, 
One ever near in fire and storm, 

And he was like the Son of God. 

Yea, he was the Son of God. 

In less conspicuous ways others have borne wit- 
ness to a like experience. Walking in the Hght of 
the Presence they have found a center of rest in 
the midst of earth's disquietude; when forlorn 
and desolate, the consciousness of the comforting 
Presence has changed the gloom of winter into 
the sunshine of summer; when the storms of life 
have beat upon their devoted heads, in the shelter- 
ing Presence they have found a safe retreat; when 
fainting on the desert march under a pitiless sun, 
they have calmly rested in the Presence as in the 
shadow of a great rock in a weary land; when 
agitated by fear and foreboding, they have heard the 
voice of One by their side whispering, 'Tear thou 
not, for I am with thee," and they have lain 

In the sunlight of God 

Like a ship in the isles of the blest. 

It is said that when the monk who opened for 
Dante the wanderer the doors of the monastery of 
Santa Croce, asked him, "What seek you here?" 
he gazed around with restless, hungry eyes, and 
slowly answered, "Pacem!" In this world of 
trouble all men seek peace; and they find it only 
when they have found the Presence. "In this 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 173 

world ye shall have tribulation," says Christ, *'but 
in me peace." 

But the Presence gives not only rest in trouble, 
it gives rest in toil. Those who dwell in the Pres- 
ence work without worry. They learn to say, 

"Labor is rest, and peace is sweet 
If thou, my God, art near." 

Or, better still, changing the one word of uncer- 
tainty in these lines into a word of assurance, they 
say, 

"Labor is rest and peace is sweet 
For thou, my God, art near." 

In this busy, bustling age, this age of restless 
activity, this age in which life has become so com- 
plex as to be burdensome, this age in which the 
brow so often becomes clouded with ''low-thoughted 
care," and when the insecurity of the future 
forms an added element of unrest, nothing can give 
us repose of soul, and hold us up as we tread the 
dusty path of daily toil, but the consciousness that 
the Lord is with us, and that our times are in his 
hands. 

It was the distinct promise of the Master at the 
time of his departure that when he returned his 
disciples would exchange weeds of mourning for 
garments of joy. ''Ye therefore now have sorrow: 
but I will see you again, and your heart shall 
rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." "I 
will not leave you orphans: I will come to you." 
Looking for the fulfillment of this promise, Peter, 



174 THE PRESENCE 

after Christ had ascended, said, "Thou shalt make 
me full of gladness in thy presence" (Acts 2. 28, 
marginal reading. Rev. Ver.). This was the 
essence of the hope of the early Christians. In 
some way Christ was to be given back to them, and 
in his gladdening presence they were to find a fore- 
glimpse of heaven. 

To us this hope has been fulfilled. We are not 
orphans in a desolate world. The consoling Pres- 
ence is ever with us. In our utmost extremity he 
is bending over us, touching our aching head with 
his hand of sympathy, and lulling us to rest. Alas 
that we should ever forget it! 

We forget — and yet he is always here! 

He knows our needs, and he heeds our sighs; 
No night so long but he sooths and stills 

Till the dawn-light rims the skies. 

IV. He Is Here to Strengthen and Transform 

This he does by his inspiring companionship. 
An eminent scientist, from whose soul the light 
of faith had faded, sorrowfully exclaimed, "The 
Great Companion is dead." The joyful declaration 
of those who walk in the way of faith is, "The 
Great Companion still lives." It is true that he 
died, and after a few brief years on this earth 
passed out of sight. But he has returned as he 
promised; and is united to his own by indissoluble 
bonds. Although unseen, he is ever with them, the 
light of their life forever. It is not enough to say 
that "the idea of his life has become a permanent 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? i75 

element in the spiritual life of the world," that his 
name has not sunk in the waters of oblivion, that 
his influence has outlived his earthly life, and that 
in this sense he has triumphed over death. Along 
with the abiding influe'nce of his thoughts and moral 
ideals we have his own abiding presence. 

The resurrection of Christ marked the beginning 
of a new and intimate relation between him and 
his people. The old friendship was renewed, but 
upon a lighter level. While the familiar friend of 
bygone days was not lost, something of awe was 
mingled with the new friendship. After his ascen- 
sion a still closer fellowship and more intimate 
communion was to be enjoyed between them. 
"Henceforth," he had said, "I call you not servants, 
but friends." Up to this time they had enjoyed his 
company outwardly ; now they were to enter into 
spiritual communion with him and become friends 
of the soul. His departure, instead of building up 
a wall of separation between them, was to break 
every barrier down. The friendship begun on the 
earthly plane would be perpetuated on a higher 
plane. They would be in the same spiritual realm, 
although on different sides of it; and while bodily 
contact would be absent, there would be the touch 
of spirit upon spirit. 

This friendship with the Divine Friend, the Friend 
of friends, which is the peculiar privilege of the 
new dispensation, is based upon reciprocal relations. 
It involves a mutual giving and taking. It is gov- 
erned by the law of mutuality expressed in the 



176 THE PRESENCE 

words, "My beloved is mine, and I am his." We open 
our hearts to him, he opens his heart to us, making 
the most intimate reveahngs of the inmost things ; 
telHng us all things that have been made known 
to him of the Father. It is our privilege, if we will 
only seize it, to be on such intimate terms with the 
Master as the Scotch people describe in the expres- 
sion, "far ben" ; that is, far in ; in the inner chamber 
of divine fellowship. To this high, and holy, and 
reverential friendship Christ invites us all. He 
longs for our company and confidence. He 
patiently waits for our response to his friendship. 

In personal attachment to the unseen Christ the 
Christian life has its roots. It is created and sus- 
tained by the contagion of his personal influence. 
To enjoy the friendship of Christ is to have a new 
force brought into life. The secret of many a 
noble life has been expressed in the wprds, "I have 
found a friend." Students get more from personal 
contact with an inspiring teacher than from books. 
In the formation of character there is no stronger 
factor than personal association. The formation 
of a new friendship may be the beginning of a new 
life; the finding of the heavenly Friend always 
means the beginning of a heavenly life. 

Companionship with the unseen Christ will slay 
all base desire and put a restraint upon wrongdoing. 
It will create that holy fear of offending which 
Cotton Mather describes in his "Magnalia" as "a 
trembling walk with God." It will lead men to 
put over the door of their hearts the words which 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 177 

Linnaeus, the celebrated naturalist, put over the 
door of his library, "Live innocently, God is pres- 
ent." Those who live in Christ's sight will live 
carefully. They will check the unkind word before 
it leaps from their lips; they will repress the cruel 
criticism before it drops from the pen; they will, 
like Moses, endure things otherwise unendurable 
"as seeing him who is invisible." By keeping him 
in their thoughts they will keep evil out of their 
hearts. In his presence unholy ambitions will be 
withered up. A single look into his face will break 
the spell of temptation and shame them out of sin. 
Thus it was with a young man addicted to gam- 
bling, who told his Sunday school teacher that he 
had not been able to break away from that evil 
habit, and added, "Were you always with me, I 
might manage to keep from it." When told of 
One who is with us always, as the power that makes 
for righteousness, upon whose help he could count 
at every crisis in his life, yielding to his spell, and 
relying upon his power, he entered upon a life of 
victory. 

Companionship with the Presence also constrains 
to rightdoing. It is impossible for those who live 
in the Presence to live at "a poor, dying rate." 
They will experience a great moral uplift. The 
Presence is dynamical. It is both an impulse and 
a power; it urges and enables. It makes the weak 
strong and the strong stronger. At the time of 
his first trial before Caesar, when he was forsaken 
by his friends, Paul said, "But the Lord stood by 



178 THE PRESENCE 

me, and gave me power" (2 Tim. 4. 17). What 
a glorious "but" ! When other helpers failed, the 
Lord he loved and served pressed up close to his 
side, giving him a sense of immeasurable help, and 
enabling him not only to pass triumphantly through 
that ordeal, but to prevail over every difficulty, and 
to go on fulfilling his mission of proclaiming to the 
world the message of salvation which had been 
committed to his trust. 

The impression has too often been made that the 
companionship of the Presence is for the aged, 
when day declines and eventide is falling fast and 
the shadows of death begin to gather. It is scarcely 
thought of at all as being for young men and 
maidens, who in Hfe's glad morning are looking 
with hearts intent for the dawning of a bright, 
new day. It is thought of as being for those who 
are in the darkness of sorrow, and is scarcely 
thought of as being for those who are in the sun- 
light of joy; it is thought of as being for the 
house of mourning, and is scarcely thought of as 
being for the house of mirth; it is thought of as 
being with those who are sighing for release from 
life's conflict, and is scarcely thought of as being 
with those who are in the thick of life's battle. 
There is need to strike a healthier note. There 
is need to see that the One who changes not is with 
those who are taking hold equally with those who 
are letting go; with those who are cHmbing the 
hill equally with those who are going down; with 
those whose life is at its flow equally with those 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 179 

whose life is at its ebb ; with the toiler equally with 
the sufferer. Peter in his sermon at Pentecost saw 
this truth when, applying to the risen Christ the 
words of David, he said 

I beheld the Lord always before my face; 
For he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved 

(Acts 2. 25). 

As he buckled on his armor to fight the battle of 
righteousness he saw his Lord present to inspire 
and strengthen him. Nothing could move him from 
his base or cause him to be faint-hearted with such 
a powerful ally at his side. In Christ's presence 
no one can live without experiencing a strange 
accession of strength of moral purpose. It is as 
when in the company of a friend of a strong and 
lofty personality every good purpose is strength- 
ened. In one of his higher moods Matthew Arnold 
gives expression to this thought in his lines entitled 
"East London": 

'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead 
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, 
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen 

In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. 

I met a preacher there I knew, and said, 
"111 and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene ?" 
"Bravely," said he, "for I of late have been 

Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, the living bread." 

This is the Christian secret. Those who feed upon 
Christ, the living bread, partake of his vivifying 
influence, are endued with his strength, are nerved 



i8o THE PRESENCE 

to strenuous endeavor, and are inspired with his 
courage and patience. They can do all things 
within the sphere of duty, however difficult, through 
Christ who strengtheneth them. 

Companionship with the Presence has been the 
mightiest force in the noblest Hves. Robert Brown- 
ing's biographer tells us that toward the end of 
his life a lady once asked him about his faith, when 
he quoted these lines of his own: 

That one face far from vanish, rather grows 
Or decomposes but to recompose — 
Became my universe that feels and knows. 

And then he added, "That is the face of Christ; 
and that is how I feel about it." When a man 
has seen the face of Christ, and has submitted him- 
self to its spell, that one face fills the vision of his 
soul and becomes his universe. The very sight of 
it unseals the deepest springs of holiness within 
his heart, and by its transforming touch fashions 
his life into the divine image. 

V. He Is Here to Judge 

For judgment he came into the world at first. 
For judgment he came the second time. The day 
of his return was a day of judgment. At the end 
of the Jewish age he appeared "in flaming fire tak- 
ing vengeance." His work of judgment was then 
disclosed. In his judicial capacity he is now 
seated upon a throne, high and lifted up. To him 
all authority has been given. Behind him are all 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? i8i 

the executive forces of the universe, which he can 
use against them that do evil. The tramp of his 
horses can be heard as they march to battle. In 
the seat of judicial power he will remain, till right 
and wrong are carried to their issues, and his 
enemies are made the footstool of his feet. 

The event described as "the day of the Lord," 
"the great and dreadful day of the Lord," was the 
day of the Lord's Second Advent. There have 
been many great and terrible days of the Lord since 
then; but the greatest of them all is still in the 
future. The age- judgments are to be followed 
by a world- judgment in which the present dispen- 
sation shall be wound up. But the importance of 
that final judgment must not be allowed to obscure 
the momentous fact that the judgment seat of 
Christ is now erected, that all men are brought 
before it, and that the work of judgment is now 
going on. The nations are being brought before 
his judgment seat, and he is separating them one 
from another, as a shepherd divideth the sheep 
from the goats. His law is the standard by which 
the nations are being judged. Everywhere the 
word of his mouth is being accepted as the supreme 
standard of moral action. 

Our industrial system is before Christ's judg- 
ment seat. In so far as it is built upon selfishness 
it stands condemned in the eyes of the world, inas- 
much as the Golden Rule of Christ has come to be 
tacitly accepted as the standard of social action. 
Whatever in the present industrial situation is con- 



i82 THE PRESENCE 

trary to the mind of Christ has upon it the seal 
of universal condemnation. 

More and more men are being judged in their 
treatment of their fellow men by Christ's ethics. 
Where he is not formally acknowledged he is often 
unconsciously honored. Whatever he does not 
approve is condemned. Whatever he approves is 
praised. To know his mind is to know the true 
ethical test. To judge righteous judgment is to 
echo his sentence. 

The judgment of Christ in this age is a con- 
tinuous process, which is made real when his pres- 
ence is made real. In the light of his countenance 
wickedness in high places, and in low places, stands 
rebuked. This is the reason why those who sin 
shun the Presence. They are afraid to come into 
the light, lest their deeds should be reproved. But 
what the presence of the judging Christ will be to 
a sinner depends upon his attitude to his sin. To 
the impenitent he will be an awful Presence before 
whom he will quake with fear; to the penitent he 
will be a gracious Presence before whom he will 
rejoice with trembling. 

In the judgment of the present the judgment of 
the future is foreshadowed; the present personal 
reckoning which all have to make with Christ is 
prophetic of the world-wide reckoning yet to come ; 
the harvest which is gathered now in the field of 
life is an earnest of the larger harvest to be gath- 
ered when the season of present opportunity is 
ended; the verdict which is now passed upon char- 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 183 

acter when it is brought for testing into the light 
of Christ's Hfe and teaching is a forecast of the 
final sentence of weal or woe which will thrill the 
heart of every man when he stands before the great 
white throne. 

VI. He Is Here to Reign 

It is distinctly stated that at the opening of the 
new age the Son of man was to be seen "coming 
in his kingdom" (Matt. 16. 28). His coming was 
to be at once personal and dispensational. He was 
to come in a kingly way; and in the establishment 
of his kingdom the end of his coming was to be 
realized. 

In the coming of the kingdom of Christ the 
Messianic hopes of the early Christians centered. 
And they had good grounds for their hopes. Jesus 
himself preached "the gospel of the kingdom" 
(Matt. 9. 35) ; he charged the twelve to preach, 
saying, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 
10. 7). Instead of looking upon his kingdom as 
something in the distant future they were to look 
upon it as something about to be set up. Upon his 
return in kingly power he was to subdue all things 
unto himself, and build up on earth that ideal king- 
dom, modeled after heavenly principles and laws, 
which he set forth as the final goal of all his effort 
and of all the effort of his people. 

The nature of his kingdom Jesus himself 
describes. "Being asked by the Pharisees, when 
the kingdom of God cometh, he answered them and 



i84 THE PRESENCE 

said, The kingdom of God cometh not with obser- 
vation : neither shall they say, Lo, here ! or, There ! 
for lo, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 
17. 20, 21). The marginal reading is, "the king- 
dom of God is in the midst of you." It was already 
there in all its potential power in the person, of its 
King. It was to come in the fullness of its power, 
when its King, crowned with honor and glory 
because of the triumph of his redeeming work, 
should return to claim for himself his kingdom, 
and make good his claim. 

The promise that he would come in his kingdom 
has been fulfilled. The king is here; his kingdom 
has come — it is coming increasingly. 

Who would sit down and sigh for a lost age of gold 
When the King of all ages is here? 

Although unseen, and often unacknowledged, he 
is reigning over this world. But how? His king- 
dom of heavenly and spiritual power is humanly 
exercised. "The king eternal, immortal, and invisi- 
ble" is not seated upon a throne remote; he does 
not dwell apart "pavilioned in splendor"; his pres- 
ence chamber is more likely to be found in some 
humble attic than in a lordly palace. He comes to us 
to-day making the same appeal to faith as in the 
days of his flesh ; and if we are to see him as he is 
now coming in his kingdom, we must get rid of all 
preconceived ideas of royalty, for this is a new kind 
of a King, and this is a new kind of a kingdom. 
Jesus sought to have it understood that his king- 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 185 

dom is not of this world; that it is not a thing 
of political dominion, but of moral supremacy; that 
its insignia is not a scepter of gold, but a scepter 
of righteousness; that it is founded not upon 
force, but upon truth; that it is upheld not by the 
arm of the state, but by the power of love. 

The coming of Christ in his kingdom presents 
his work of salvation in its social rather than in 
its individual aspects. He is the Saviour of the 
world as well as the Saviour of the soul. He is 
in the midst of the social wreck and ruin, seeking 
to build out of its scattered fragments the new 
temple of God; he is removing oppressive burdens, 
making social adjustments, promoting social right- 
eousness, actualizing social ideals, and bringing the 
sons of men into possession of their heavenly birth- 
right. In his hand is the only solution of the social 
and industrial problems of to-day. 

His method is radical in that it founds all social 
reform upon spiritual change, making all political 
and economic progress dependent upon the develop- 
ment of right character, and seeking to bring in 
the ideal social order by creating ideal lives. Not 
by the improvement of the social machine, but by 
the generating of a new motive power; not by the 
increase of collective and average wealth and com- 
fort, but by the increase of goodness ; not by the 
elimination of poverty, but by the destruction of 
selfishness; not by the awakening of a spirit of 
enlightened self-interest, but by the creation of a 
spirit of brotherly self-sacrifice will the high hopes 



i86 THE PRESENCE 

that fill the hearts of the socialistic dreamers be 
realized. Before socialism can enter the kingdom 
of heaven it must be born from above. An English 
socialist remarks that many of the panaceas offered 
are of no more value than a poultice to a wooden 
leg. His words are true, although in a different 
sense from that in which he meant them. There 
is one, and only one panacea for our social ills, 
and that is the birth of a new spirit. Social ref- 
ormation cannot be reached in any shorter or easier 
way than by personal regeneration. 

The force upon which Christ depends for the 
bringing in of the kingdom is set forth by Peter, 
in his sermon in Solomon's porch, in the words, 
''Repent ye therefore, and turn again, that your 
sins may be blotted out, that so there may come 
seasons of refreshing from the presence of the 
Lord; and that he may send the Christ who hath 
been appointed for you, even Jesus: whom the 
heaven must receive until the times of restoration 
of all things" (Acts 3. 19-21). Mark, the times of 
refreshing were to come from the presence of the 
Lord. The point, then, to be settled is whether 
or not the heaven which received him has restored 
him. If he has not returned, he is not present; 
and if he is not present, the better times which he 
was to bring are still in the future. That the early 
Christians believed in his speedy revisitation is 
beyond question. They believed also that with his 
return a happy era was to dawn upon them. From 
his Presence would come times of invigoration. 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 187 

National prosperity would be revived. New life 
and strength would be breathed into the nation's 
withered heart. The dry bones which the prophet 
saw in the valley of vision would start into life, 
and would become a conquering host. With times 
of refreshing would come times of restoration, for 
these are linked together, or, more properly, are 
identified as one. Ancient wrongs would be 
redressed. The glory of the former days would 
be restored, and Zion would become the joy and 
praise of the whole earth. Now, the object of 
Peter in his sermon was to show that in a far 
grander sense than they had ever dreamed of, the 
great consummation ''whereof God spake by the 
mouth of his holy prophets which have been since 
the world began," was about to be realized in Jesus 
the Christ. From his presence was to come the 
inbreathing of new life into the heart of a repentant 
people. As the true Messiah, in whom all hope 
centered, he was to be received with spiritual pre- 
paredness and acknowledged with glad acclaim. 

But to what dire straits are those commentators 
driven who hold that the words of Peter refer to 
the return of the Lord at the end of the world. 
''The apostle," says Hackett, "enforces his exhor- 
tation to repent by an appeal to the final coming 
of Christ, not because he would represent it as near 
in point of time, but because the event was always 
near to the feeling and consciousness of the first 
believers." That is to say, the apostle would have 
them feel that the Lord was near, he would have 



i88 THE PRESENCE 

them conscious of his nearness for practical effects, 
although he himself knew that they were hugging 
to their hearts a delusive hope. A needless slight 
upon the apostle's honesty, to say the least of it ! 

In their survey of the future the early Chris- 
tians did not take a long perspective. They were 
too deeply impressed with the things that were near 
to give much thought to the things that were dis- 
tant. But while they looked upon the Lord's com- 
ing as imminent, not until after Pentecost did they 
begin to have a glimmering sense of the nature 
of his kingdom, and to look for the quickening 
of spiritual life rather than for the reviving of 
national prosperity, for a heavenly rule rather than 
for a heavenly realm, for the restoration of the 
world into harmony with the divine order rather 
than for the restoration of national glory. They, 
in fine, began then to look at the things of Christ 
from the Christian rather than from the Jewish 
point of view. 

And we who live in the new age, upon the thresh- 
old of which they stood, will utterly fail to under- 
stand its significance, if we do not see that Christ 
the Quickener and Restorer has come, and is now 
at work. Since his return he has entered into new 
and closer relations with men. All times of 
refreshing are from his presence. From him come 
all the influences which are making for individual 
and social reconstruction. He is here, bringing a 
dead world back to life ; restoring to the divine unity 
a world disordered by sin. As the Head of the new 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 189 

creation, he is bringing earth into everlasting 
reunion with heaven. 

To the question, What does the Presence fore- 
token? there can, therefore, be only one answer. It 
foretokens the fulfillment of Christ's purpose, to 
wit, the establishment on earth of his universal rule. 
He is to be King of the only real world-empire. 
Upon his head are to be many crowns. The uni- 
versal dominion which is his by right he is to 
possess. He will reach his kingdom by the recog- 
nition of his kinghood. To see him coming as a 
King is to see him coming in his kingdom. 

The presence of Christ is the pledge of the ulti- 
mate triumph of his kingdom. If he is here in 
the power of the Spirit we have every reason to 
expect great things from him. We cannot paint 
the future too brightly if it is in his hands. To 
those who believe in the potency of the Presence 
pessimism is impossible. The reason why the 
inspiration of hope has died out of the church is 
because the sense of Christ's presence has become 
dim. The days of buoyant, youthful hopefulness 
have always been days when the church has been 
deeply imbued with the consciousness of the pres- 
ence of her Lord. 

There are those who, looking abroad upon the 
increasing conflict between good and evil, estimate 
that the two forces are so evenly balanced as to 
preclude the possibility of any great measure of 
progress. It almost seems to them as if the con- 
flict which is now on must end in a drawn battle. 



190 THE PRESENCE 

Their gloomy forebodings come from not seeing 
the invisible Leader who is at the head of the forces 
of good, and is pushing them on to certain victory. 

Others, glowingly optimistic, see not only victory 
for the right, but they see it close at hand. The 
world which they look upon is growing steadily 
better. It has within itself the power of recupera- 
tion. Only give it a little time and it is well able 
to overcome all alien forces, and to work out its 
own salvation. 

Others regard the present order of things as 
doomed to failure. They believe that the world 
is growing worse. They have no hope of victory 
from the forces that are at present in operation, 
and which are at the command of the church. They 
do not think that Christ is making much headway. 
What he is gaining at one point he is more than 
losing at another. They even hold that it is not 
the mission of the church to convert the world, and 
that hence all her well-meaning efforts to compass 
this result must of necessity prove abortive. They 
are looking forward to a general collapse. And 
when things have come to the worst the absent 
Christ will return to begin his millennial reign. 
This pessimistic view they regard as conclusively 
established by the Lord's words, "When the Son 
of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" 
(Luke 1 8. 8) — words which have no reference 
whatever to the final issue of the struggle between 
good and evil in the present gospel age, but to what 
might happen at the close of the Jewish age. Jesus 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 191 

merely raises the question as to whether in the 
days of trouble which were fast approaching his 
disciples would hold fast to him; or whether, in 
spite of the promise that he would "avenge them 
speedily," the faith of many might not fail. The 
assumption drawn from these words, that things are 
to go from bad to worse, until, at the final coming 
of Christ, faith will be practically extinct, is with- 
out the slightest foundation. 

There are others who take a medium view of 
things. They believe in the final victory of the 
right. They hold, with Professor Drummond, that 
"the whole tone of the Bible when it speaks of the 
final results of the world's history, is of jubilee 
and triumph, never of sorrow and despondency." 
They believe, with John Bunyan, that "there will 
come a time when Antichrist will be a matter of 
history, when saints will speak of how he grew 
and spread, and how he was consumed by the 
breath of the Lord's mouth, and destroyed by the 
brightness of his coming." Yet they do not believe 
that the goal is to be reached at a single bound, 
or that the path of human progress will describe 
a straight line. Obstacles many and great will have 
to be surmounted. The conflict of the human will 
with the divine purpose, out of which have grown 
the tragedies of the ages, will continue. Retro- 
grade movements will take place, but they will 
be only temporary. Upheavals will take place, but 
they will usher in a higher stage of living. With 
travail throes the new age will be born. Christ 



192 THE PRESENCE 

will be ultimately victorious. He will gain supreme 
control of all things: "For he must reign, till he 
hath put all his enemies under his feet" (i Cor. 

15. 25). 

The world-wide work of social redemption which 
Christ has begun he is well able to finish. He has 
power to draw the world to himself, and to recon- 
struct it according to the heavenly ideal. He him- 
self never doubted the ultimate triumph of his 
kingdom. His teaching does not contain a single 
pessimistic note. Never once did he doubt his 
ability to deliver the world from sin and from all 
the havoc sin has wrought. And thus far he has 
made good. Our hope that he will succeed is based 
upon the knowledge of what he has already accom- 
plished. He has given us every reason to beHeve 
in him. His presence has been the glow of a new 
sunrise, the dawning of a new day of catholicity, 
freedom, justice, kindness, brotherhood. Unless 
he withdraws from the world, and gives it up, we 
have no reason to doubt its ultimate redemption, 
for his power over it is constantly increasing. As 
never before he is the central object of the world's 
hope. Even those who have lost faith in the church 
often retain faith in him. They acknowledge the 
immense debt of gratitude which the world owes 
him ; they turn to him in the hour of extremity as 
the true and tried Friend of humanity ; with a faith 
that puts to shame the unbelief of those Christians 
who magnify what Christ is going to do by mini- 
fying what he has already done, they believe in the 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 193 

glorious possibilities of the present — holding that 
if Christ's way were only followed all would be 
right with the world. What comfort of hope would 
come to this class did they also see that the Christ 
who is Lover and Brother of all men holds the 
future of the world in his wounded hands ! 

The perplexing problems of the present require 
to be studied in the light of the presence of Christ. 
If he is here in all the plenitude of his spiritual 
power his presence is to be taken into account in 
the solution of all the political, social, and indus- 
trial problems that now confront us. Let his pres- 
ence become a living reality, and the future will 
be faced with calm hopefulness ; for working 
alongside of the leaven of iniquity will be seen a 
power sufficient to counteract it. Mighty is sin, 
but mightier is the grace of the unseen Christ. 

War still goes on. True; but Christ, the Prince 
of Peace, is here to end it. No hand but his can stay 
the red hand of rapine and bring peace on earth. 
Until his love quenches human greed and hate, 
the sword shall not be beat into the plowshare, nor 
the spear into the pruning hook. Let the world 
bow before his scepter, "and nation shall not lift 
up sword against nation, neither shall they learn 
war any more." 

Unrighteous oppression exists. Yes, but Christ 
is here to end it. There is no wrong that he is 
not able to righten, no evil for which he has not pro- 
vided a remedy, no emergency for which he is 
unprepared. He knows all about the present situa- 



194 THE PRESENCE 

tion. His tear-dimmed eyes that looked from the 
brow of Olivet upon Jerusalem take in the whole 
of the sin and sorrow of every city. He sees the 
unjust monopolies which rob men of that equality 
of opportunity which is their inalienable birthright, 
and which crush honest industry into the dust; he 
sees the growing bitterness and dissatisfaction of 
the working classes ; he sees the increasing intensity 
of the fight for bread; he sees the car of progress 
transformed into the car of modern juggernaut, 
whose path is marked by the mangled souls and 
bodies of the victims of an unchristian commercial- 
ism. Indifferent to these things he cannot be. 
Upon the spoiler he looks with eyes of flame, upon 
the victim with eyes of tenderest pity. But is he 
impotent? Can he do nothing to help? Is he doing 
nothing to help? Is he unable to effect social 
adjustments, to transform business methods, to 
furnish new social ideals and to impart new social 
motives? Who that believes in him as the world's 
Redeemer can for a moment doubt his power ? We 
may be sure that where anything is wrong, he will 
not leave it alone until he has put it right. He is 
not yet through with the world. "He shall not fail 
nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in 
the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law." 
Long and toilsome may be the way, many and dark 
may be the tragedies which come from the opposi- 
tion of the forces of evil to the divine program, 
but his plan will not miscarry, nor will his power fail 
in the accomplishment of its object. The evolu- 



WHAT IS CHRIST HERE FOR? 195 

tionary process which has God for its origin and 
Christ for its agent has redemption for its end. A 
redeemed world, a finished world, a world brought 
by the unseen Christ into harmony with heaven's 
order is the goal to which all things tend. 

O, that the church of to-day might see that 
Christ has not delayed his coming, that he has not 
kept the world waiting through long centuries for 
his return; but that since "for to this end Christ 
both died and rose, and revived, that he might be 
the Lord both of the dead and living" (Rom. 14. 9), 
his presence in the world to-day means that he 
is here to establish his sovereignty over men. 
Instead, then, of looking for his coming through 
the cloven skies, the church is to look for it in the 
triumph of righteousness through the leavening of 
the world with the gospel of his grace; instead i)f 
pushing all the manifestations of his power into 
the future, she is to look upon her living Lord as 
her powerful ally whom nothing can vanquish, her 
unseen King, whose complete sovereignty over all 
the kingdoms of the world no alien power can ever 
usurp, that she may arise from the dust and shine 
forth in the resplendent glory of her puissant King, 
fair as the moon in love, clear as the sun in holine<?s, 
and terrible in might as a bannered host. 



PART IX 
LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 



197 



PART IX 

LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 

It is our privilege to live continually in the Pres- 
ence. But let the distinction be carefully noted 
between living in the Presence and living in the 
consciousness of the Presence. To live in the con- 
tinuous consciousness of the Presence is a sheer 
impossibility. The mind must necessarily be taken 
up with a multitude of mundane things which com- 
pel us to withdraw our thought for the time from 
contemplation upon the things of the unseen realm. 
And just in proportion to the diligence which we 
give to the daily tasks which are concerned with 
outward things, will the distinct consciousness of 
the Presence be absent. Are we therefore to con- 
clude that the Presence is fitful, and that it has 
gone from us? By no means. As we breathe the 
atmosphere without being aware of the fact ; as we 
walk in the light of the day without thinking of the 
sun, so we breathe the atmosphere of the Lord's 
presence, and walk in the Hght of his countenance 
without thinking distinctly of him. The Indian 
sage, Ramakrishna, exclaims: "Thou seest many 
stars at night in the sky, but findest them not when 
the sun rises. Canst thou say, then, that there are 
no stars in the heaven by day ? So, O man, because 
thou beholdest not the Almighty in the days of thy 

199 



200 THE PRESENCE 

ignorance say not there is no God." God is just 
as near when his presence is obscured by the earth- 
born clouds of doubt and unbelief as when we 
rejoice in the light of his countenance. 

Modern philosophers speak of a subconscious 
mind in which the past experiences are treasured 
up. If we believe in this deeper region lying below 
the line of ordinary consciousness, we can see how 
the experience of the past may become the con- 
servator of the faith of the present. The Christ 
who has once manifested himself to us may be still 
with us, although we are not conscious of his pres- 
ence. It is a great gain when we learn to walk by 
faith rather than by feeling. Feeling is a variable 
quantity. Sometimes it is altogether absent. When 
directly sought it generally eludes us. It often 
comes to those who seek it not. When absorbed 
in thought of the Presence it comes unbidden. But 
whether it comes or not, we are to hold on to the 
immutable fact of the Presence. We are to cling 
to the divine hand in the dark, believing that God 
is just as truly with us as when we walk rejoicingly 
in the sunshine. Brother Lawrence tells us that 
when, because of his wanderings of heart and fail- 
ures of duty, the sense of God's presence was 
clouded, "without being discouraged he set his 
mind right again, and continued his exercise of the 
Presence as if he had never deviated from it." 
Doing this the cloud passed. In this way we become 
independent of moods, and live in the Presence even 
although the thought of the unseen Christ does not 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 201 

rise distinctly into consciousness. There is, there- 
fore, no reason to utter the wail : 

Sometimes I catch sweet glimpses of his face, 

But that is all; 
Sometimes he looks on me and seems to smile, 

But that is all. 
Sometimes he speaks a passing word of peace, 

But that is all; 
Sometimes I hear his loving voice 

Upon me call. — Bonar. 

What more ought one who walks with Christ by 
faith to expect ? If moments beautiful and rare are 
given when the vision breaks upon us, let us rejoice ; 
but when the vision fades, as fade it must, let us 
not mourn. It is good to be on Tabor, but it is 
not good to tarry there too long. When we come 
down from the Mount we are to remember that the 
reality of which we caught a glimpse never changes. 
And having seen the glory of the Lord, we are 
henceforth to shape our lives according to the pat- 
tern shown us on the Mount. The experience of 
Christ's presence which came to Jonathan Edwards, 
as he was meditating one day in the woods, was 
never repeated, but its influence upon his after life y^ 
was as pronounced as was the vision of the risen 
Christ upon Saul of Tarsus ; and by that experience 
his faith in the perpetual Presence was confirmed > 
and his whole after life was shaped. These divine 
visitations, which come and go we know not how, 
never leave us as they find us. Their enjoyment 
is transient, but their effect is permanent. "Whe,n 



202 THE PRESENCE 

the mood has passed," says Herrmann, "its traces 
still remain, and keep alive the longing for its 
peace." 

It is said of Tennyson — of whose religious life 
we know so little — that he lived in the habitual 
sense of the Divine Presence. "What the sun is 
to that flower," he once said, "Jesus Christ is to my 
soul." Walking with his niece on the beautiful 
downs of the Isle of Wight, with bright skies bend- 
ing over him, and the sea sounding in his ears, he 
said: "God is with us now on this down just as 
truly as Christ was on the way to Emmaus. We 
cannot see him, but he, the Father, the Saviour, 
and the Spirit, is nearer perhaps now than then, to 
those who are not afraid to believe the word of the 
apostle about the real presence of God and his 
Christ with all who yearn for it." Out of the faith 
which makes the Presence real were born the lines, 

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 

By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove. 

From the very nature of the case the present appeal 
of Christ from the unseen realm must be made to 
the soul rather than to the senses, to faith rather 
than to sight. And faith is a venture — a trusting 
of the unknown for the known. When exercised 
it is justified, for it "falls upon the seeming void 
and finds the rock beneath." As the unknown 
writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews has so well 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 203 

defined it, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped 
for, the proving of things not seen." It is a power 
of spiritual discernment which enables those who 
possess it to see things which from other eyes are 
hid. It enabled the aged Simeon, when Mary 
brought her firstborn into the temple for "purifica- 
tion and redemption," to see in the helpless Babe 
the one whose hand was to break the fetters of 
sin and bring deHverance to the race. In the 
appearance of the Babe there was nothing to arrest 
attention. There was no nimbus of glory around 
his head. He was just an ordinary peasant child to 
look at ; yet the anointed eyes of Simeon saw in him 
the Prince of Peace, the King of Glory. So, to 
those who look for him, and long for him, and hope 
for him, the true Christ now appears. The soul's 
eyes grow strong by looking; and to those who 
tarry for it the vision comes. But he never 

Vobtrudes himself, and seldom does he come as he 
was expected. AVe look for him to come at the 
front door with pomp and ceremony, and he comes 

—at the back door unobserved^ How many of us 
would have recognized him in the days of his flesh ? 
Would we have discovered the Messiah in a humble 
Jewish peasant, a king in the son of a carpenter? 
Let us beware lest we are now Wind to the 
glory of his presence. Let us seek for him, 
not in outward and spectacular ways, but in 

^the secret places of the heart. Let us seek 
him, not in the whirlwind and the fire, but in 
the voice of gentle stillness. -.^^ 



204 THE PRESENCE 

Speak low to me my Saviour, low and sweet, 
From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low, 
Lest I should fear and fall, and miss thee so, 

Who art not missed by any that entreat. 

HOW TO LIVE IN THE PRESENCE 

In order to live in the Presence two things are 
necessary : ( i ) That the Presence be recognized ; 
(2) that it be cultivated, or, as it has become the 
vogue to put it, that it be practiced. 

1. The Recognition of the Presence 

The Presence is often unrecognized. It may 
still be said, *Tn the midst of you standeth one 
whom ye know not" (John i. 26^. Sometimes we 

^ recognize the Presence only after the vision of it 
has fled, and, looking back upon an experience the 
full meaning of which we did not understand at 
ihe time, we exclaim with Jacob, ''Surely the Lord 

( was in this place ; and I knew it not." How many 
priceless blessings have come to the children of 
men from the hand of the unknown Christ? He 
has been moving through the centuries, scattering 
blessings broadcast over this sin-cursed earth. He 
is now in our midst. He is not merely looking at 
us out of the pages of the New Testament, or look- 
ing at us over the battlements of heaven, but stand- 
ing before us looking deep into our souls. It is his 
voice that speaks through conscience ; it is his 
touch that opens our blinded eyes and heals our 
wounded hearts; it is his hand that dispenses the 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 205 

mercies manifold which we enjoy; it is his power 
that directs and controls the great spiritual move- 
ments of this age. The living, the eternal Christ 
even now standeth in the midst of us. Alas, 
that we should ever be blind to the glory of his 
presence ! 

But more wonderful still, not only is he in our 
midst, he is( dwelling in the depths of our soulsl 
This is the mystery which Paul says was "hid for 
ages and generations: but now hath it been mani- 
fested to his saints," to wit, "Christ in you the hope 
of glory" (Col. i. 26, 2J^. And mark, this is not 
the description of an experience which only an elect 
few can hope to attain, it is the statement of a fact 
concerning all Christians — the statement of a fact 
into the consciousness of which it is tiie privilege 
of all to rise. 

But whether the presence of Christ be recog- 
nized or not, nothing can alter the fact that he is 
([j'eally with us and in us. Not long ago the presence 
of electricity was unrecognized. Men lived in the 
presence of that mighty force ; they saw its effects, 
and yet did not suspect its existence. What good 
did it do them in their ignorance? Consciously 
none; actually much. Though they knew it not, 
that beneficent force was in constant operation on 
, their behalf. One day they woke up to the recogni- 
1 tion of this omnipotent force, and what happened? 
I They saw that the powerful friend who had been 
j working unweariedly in their behalf could be made 
■ still larger use of. And so they said: "We will 



2o6 THE PRESENCE 

harness this power and make it serve us. We will 
make it light our dwellings, propel our cars, drive 
our machinery." And now electrical experts like 
Edison and Tesla fill our minds with wonder and 
awe as they tell us of the hitherto undreamed of 
possibilities that lie within this newly discovered 
force. Electricity was as truly here in all the full- 
ness of its power when men did not know of it as it 
has been since they have known of it. But what a 
difference even a slight knowledge of its presence, 
and nature, and of the laws of its operation, has 
made ! ( And so if men would only wake up to a 
sense of the presence of Christ, and put themselves, 
into right relation with the mighty moral power 
emanating from him, what marvelous things would 
follow jyWhen we do not recognize the reality of the 
Presence, it is to us, for the time being, as if it 
did not exist. To consciously realize it is to get a 
grip upon it, and to enter into its possession — it 
is to claim as our own what has already been given 
to us, to make our own what has already been 
made over to us. 

The main reason why the Presence is unrecog- 
nized is because men turn their faces from it; or, 
what amounts to the same thing, allow their souls 
to be so clouded by self-seeking, impurity, or insin- 
cerity as to shut it from sight. "The pure in heart 
shall see God." A small coin held before the eye 
will blot the world from sight, and a small sin will 
hide from the soul the vision of God. 
f But when from any cause the Presence is hid. 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 207 

che possibility of finding him lies in the fact that 
he is near./ We speak of "coming to Christ" ; but 
no movement on our part toward him would avail 
anything if he had not taken the initiative. He 
is ever seeking the seeker ;f he is ever answering the 
heart's unconscious craving for himself; he is ever 
pressing himself upon those who need him, but who 
do. not want him. But before he can be found a 
forward movement toward him must be made. 
The Old Testament teaches men to seek the Lord 
while he is near; the New Testament teaches them 
to seek him because he is near. All his approaches 
' to men are made that they may be incited "to feel 
after him, and find him, though he be not far from 
each one of us." It is not, therefore, for the Pres- 
ence, but for the revelation of the Presence that we 
are now to wait. 

Present we know thou art, 
But O! thyself reveal. 

Teach us to feel that thou art always nigh. Open 
our eyes to the vision of thy glory, which is ever 
before us for the seeing! 

The vastness of the universe and the greatness of 
God make the thought of his personal interest in 

^ the events of our daily life a difficult thing to grasp ; 
but, happily, the discovery of the vastness of the 
universe has been connected with the discovery 

- of the interdependence of its parts. The Presence 
in which all things have their unity, dwells equally 
in the dewdrop and in the largest planet that swings 



2o8 THE PRESENCE 

through space. It is revealed by Jesus as a fatherly 
Presence, which takes account of the infinitely 
small as well as the infinitely great, numbering the 
hairs of our head as well as numbering the stars of 
heaven — a Presence all-seeing, all-knowing, all- 
loving, and all-helpful. Yet how few know it as 
such. 

A clergyman trying to console a hard-pressed 
man ventured to say something about God's readi- 
ness to help. The man looked him sharply in the 
face and asked, "Does God know?" Whereupon 
one standing by asked with blended bitterness and 
scorn, "Does God care?" Yes, he both knows and 
cares. The gods of Olympus lived in perpetual 
sunshine, looking down with supreme indifference 
upon the strife and tumult of life. The God who 
is manifested in Jesus has pitched his tent among 
us, that he might be near to help. There is nothing 
concerning us which he does not know; nothing 
in which he is not interested ; nothing in which he 
does not share. He suffers with us in our afflic- 
tions, he rejoices with us in our joys. Nor does 
he come to us only in startling providences, but 
in the ordinary events of Hfe ; nor is he with us 
merely upon great occasions, but also in the most 
colorless experiences ; nor is he with us merely in 
times of spiritual elevation, but also in times of 
deepest depression. Dr. Doddridge dreamed that 
he was transported into the spirit world, and taken 
to a room the walls of which were adorned with 
a series of frescoes, in which his life was delineated 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 209 

from infancy to old age. What astonished him 
most was the discovery that the whole of his life 
had been spent under the supervision of his Lord ; 
and that in all the good that had befallen him, all 
the way he had traveled, and in all the work he 
had done, Christ had been his constant Guide and 
Protector, his inspiration and his strength. 

What comfort is his who, having come to recog- 
nize the immediate action of Christ upon his life, 
can say, "Thou hast beset me behind and before, 
and laid thine hand upon me" (Psa. 139. 5). 
"Thou hast been behind me in my past; thou wilt 
be before me in my future ; thou art in contact with 
me in the present." It is well to look back to 
Christ, but more important is it to look up to Christ, 
and see in him a present helper and Saviour. The 
recognition of his Presence is the dawn of spiritual 
life. 

II. The Practice of the Presence 

The second thing necessary to living in the Pres- 
ence is the practice of the Presence. The phrase 
is one which we owe to Brother Lawrence, whose 
little book on "The Practice of the Presence of 
God the Best Rule of a Holy Life," has become a 
devotional classic. The practice of the Presence 
has made the bare and narrow life of this humble 
lay monk of the seventeenth century an inspiration 
to many. This godly man walked, according to his 
lights, habitually in the Divine Presence. His 
office of cook in the monastery of the barefooted 



210 THE PRESENCE 

Carmelites at Paris was one for which he had a 
natural aversion; yet he made drudgery divine by 
imparting into it a heavenly spirit. He applied 
himself diligently to outward things, and while 
his hands were busy with uncongenial tasks his 
spirit sat in heavenly places with Christ. ^ Imbued 
with a habitual sense of God's presence, he seldom 
felt the need of stated prayer. Although he retired 
to pray, according to the direction of his superior, 
he did not want such retirement, nor ask for it, 
because his business did not divert him from God. 
"The time of business," said he, "does not differ 
from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter 
of the kitchen, when several persons are at the 
same time calling for different things, I possess 
God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my 
knees at the blessed sacrament." To one who lives 
thus in the presence of God, communion is 
unbroken, and the whole of life a prayer. As a 
poet has said. 

Transfigured in his glory fair, 

The whole world stands, one house of prayer — 

One anteroom of heaven; 
For surely, though we know it not, 
His presence is in every spot, 

To those that seek it given. 

With the vast majority of people formal, stated 
« prayer is necessary to the practice of the Presence. 
Without it they cannot keep in touch with the 
Infinite. Whatever be its form, in all prayer there 
is a conscious outgoing of the soul to God ^Vinged 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 211 / 

) / 

with desire, and impelled by a sense of need' ; and 

also the conscious opening of the soul to God that 
communications from him may be received. Prayer 
is something more than meditation; it is the reach- 
ing up of the heart to One who is bending over us ; 
"the bridal moment of the soul," when man holds 
intercourse with his Lord; "the time when heaven 
and earth kiss each other," as a Jewish mystic puts 
it. It is the time when the spirit of man has found 
its center of harmony and rest in "the Father of 
spirits." 
^ Said one Scotch lad to another, "Do you ken 
Jesus ?" 

"Aye." 

"But do you ken him to speak to?" 

This question goes to the heart of the subject 
of prayer. Brother Lawrence describes prayer as 
"the habitual, silent, and sacred conversation of the 
(^ soul with God." To pray is to be on speaking terms 
with God; it is to go to him and receive blessing 
directly from his hand. , As prayer grows from an 
emergency act to a habit, and from a habit to an 
attitude of the soul, there may be less formal peti- 
tion than there once was, but there will be a more 
distinct sense of the Divine Presence, a more abid- 
ing confidence in the divine goodness. /But even 
when prayer is occasional rather than habitual, the 
soul that prays, the soul that walks and talks with 
God, the soul that has communion with the source 
of life, the soul that opens itself completely to God, 
is filled at once with his peace, and joy, and 



212 THE PRESENCE 

strength. Speaking out of such an experience, all 
praying souls can say, with Archbishop Trench : 

Lord, what a change within us one short hour 
Spent in thy presence will avail to make ! 
What heavy burdens from our bosoms take! 

What parched grounds revive as with a shower ! 

We kneel, and all around us seems to lower; 
We rise, and all the distant and the near 
Stand forth in sunny outline brave and clear. 

We kneel, how weak ! We rise, how full of power ! 

'V Another thing which assists in the practice of the 
V Presence is the habit of affirmation. In the face 
of all fluctuations of inward feeling, or changes of 
outward experience, « the presence of God is to be 
continually affirmed until it becomes the very life- 
v/ blood of the soul. /The repetition which the Saviour 
condemned was vain repetition" — empty, meaning- 
less repetition. Repetition when sincere and mean- 
ingful is one of the greatest elements of spiritual 
power. Let a man when he awakes in the morning 
exercise himself in the truth of God's nearness by 
affirming, "The Lord is with me" ; let him during 
the day pause in the whirl of business and repeat 
the affirmation ; let him repeat it when encountering 
some temptation or difficulty with which he is 
unable to cope; let him repeat it again when he 
closes his eyes at night, and he will ride upon the 
high places of the earth. His life with such a key- 
note will flow on above earth's lamentations, blend- 
ing with the heavenly harmonies. 

To keep the Lord before the soul, to hold on to 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 213 

the absolute fact of his presence through all weath- 
ers, requires resolute effort. When the psalmist 
says, "I have set the Lord always before me," his. 
words imply that this result was not reached with- 
out strenuous struggle. The distractions of the 
senses had to be surmounted; trifling and sinful 
thoughts had to be driven outythe natural feeling 
of inertia had to be overcome before the soul could 
cleave its upward way, and reach the secret place 
of the Most High, wl;iose holy calm no earthly care 
or sorrow can invade/ 

The practice of the Presence was what old divines 
were wont to speak of as "acting faith"; that is, 
acting upon it, acting it out. Faith is too often 
allowed to be dormant. When alive it is active ; it 
lifts the soul up to God upon its wings as easily 
and naturally as a bird Hfts itself into the air. 

The practice of the Presence involves separation 
from the world. "Where did you find God ?" asked 
Tauler of a pious beggar. "Where I left all the 
creatures," was the reply. \ We must go apart from 
the multitude, breaking connection with the 
external world, separating ourselves from outward 
things which divide the attention and disturb the 
mind, "entering the silence," and opening the soul 
to the spiritual and the eternal. "Separate your- 
self," says William Law, from all common thoughts, 
and make your heart as sensible as you can to the 
Divine Presence." / Let nothing interpose between 
your soul and the world of spiritual realities ; enter 
into your closet and shut to the door — shutting your- 



214 THE PRESENCE 

self out from the noisy world, and shutting yourself 
in with God, so that you may be alone with him. 
Then "be silent before him"; be all ear, and his 
voice will be heard in the stillness. 

Recognizing the need for times of pause in busy 
lives Jesus said to his disciples, "Come ye apart 
and rest awhile" — not, "go apart by yourselves," 
but, "come apart with me." He wished to accom- 
pany them, that they might commune together upon 
the things by which the inner life is nourished, and 
thus fulfill to them the ancient promise, "When I 
have drawn thee into the desert place, there will 
I speak to thy heart." 

In times of retirement care must be taken 
not to allow the mind to wander into vacancy. Reso- 
lute effort is required to preempt it for God. When 
it is left vacant the unclean spirits return. Deliver- 
ance from evil thoughts comes by displacement. 
The Presence is elusive unless it is passionately 
sought after. It is concealed from the indifferent, 
and revealed to the lover. "If a man love me," 
says Jesus, "my Father will manifest himself to 
him, and we will come and make our abode with 
him." Love makes the vision real. It gives that 
awareness of God of which the mystics speak. The 
full realization of the Presence comes "to those 
V who love his appearing." 

To practice the Presence is to yield to its spell, 
U, to surrender to its power. Just as we are influenced 
by the unseen dead, being swayed by their judg- 
ments, and trying to solve our knotty problems in 



LIVING IN THE PRESENCE 215 

the light of their superior knowledge, so with more 
certainty we turn to the unseen Christ, seeking to 
know his will and asking him to solve our doubtful 
questions. We "inquire in his temple"; we want 
to know his mind about everything; we sit at his 
feet anxious to be taught. Assured that in some 
way he can communicate his mind to us, we ask 
when in perplexity, "Lord, what wouldst thou have 
me to do?" What a great privilege it would be 
esteemed to meet one of the master minds of the 
world, and ask him questions ! How much we 
would prize one hour with the apostle Paul, to pro- 
pound to him some of the questions which vex and 
perplex us ! Do we realize sufficiently that the way 
to Christ is always open, and that we can go to him 
at all times and consult him about the things which 
baffle our wisdom? How blessed it is to know 
that he is ready to give, and that we are capable 
of receiving definite instruction! If all outward 
voices are stilled, that the inward voice may be 
heard, we shall hear him say, "This is the way; 
walk ye in it." 

Along with the habit of referring everything to 
Christ will come the habit of bringing ourselves 
into the scrutiny of his presence, that we may 
hear his verdict upon our lives. Our work must 
be sun-tested, it must be held up into the light for 
his inspection and approval. 

The long bazaar will praise — but Thou, 
Heart of my heart, have I done well? 

— Kipling. 



2i6 THE PRESENCE 

What boots it who may praise, if the "Well done"' 
of the Master be not won ! 

And, finally, the practice of the Presence involves 
a spirit of active obedience. "He who does the 
work of Christ," says Fra Angelico, "must dwell 
continually with him." Equally true is it that he 
who does the work of Christ will dwell continually 
with him. "If any man willeth to do his will, he 
shall know of the teaching" (John 7. 17). The 
vision that waits for those who return from the 
call of duty is always a brighter one than that which 
they left. Never does the face of Christ look so 
beautiful as when we come to lay down at his feet 
the sheaves which we have gathered in the harvest 
fields of life. Because he was not disobedient to 
the heavenly vision of which he could speak, which 
came to him at the beginning of his Christian 
career, Paul afterward was caught up into the third 
heavens, "and heard unspeakable words, which it 
is not lawful for a man to utter." Unto those who 
improve what they have shall more be given. To 
those who do his will as far as they know it, the 
deeper mysteries will be revealed, i It is not enough 
to be receptive, we must also be responsive. / Stand- 
ing within call, ready for orders, is the most advan- 
tageous position in which to see the face of the 
King and to hear his voice. Doing the things which 
he has bidden is the best way to gain a clearer and 
stronger sense of his presence. 



PART X 
THE PRESENCE UNVEILED 



217 



THE PRESENCE UNVEILED 

We have plowed straight across the doctrine of 
the Presence, and have now come to the end of the 
furrow. We began with a consideration of the 
Presence as veiled in nature, in providence, and 
in the soul of man ; then we considered the Presence 
as localized and Hmited in the Old Testament; as 
visualized and personalized in the incarnation; as 
spiritualized in the resurrection of Jesus; as uni- 
versalized in the Holy Spirit. Then we considered 
the Presence as it now is, in its varied operations 
and manifestations; and now we come to a consid- 
eration of the Presence as it is to be in its final 
unfoldings, at the end of the age and in the world 
to come. 

I. At the End of the Present Age 

The present Christian age now running its 
course, being the final age, its end will synchronize 
with the end of the world. To this final goal much 
of the teaching of Jesus has reference. His descrip- 
tions of last things are not exhausted in his spiritual 
advent at the end of the Jewish age ; nor are they 
exhausted in the age-long progress of his kingdom, 
which is compared to the working of leaven or to 
the growth of seed. They point forward to some 
far remote climacteric event, in which the present 
process of redemption will be culminated in some 
219 



220 THE PRESENCE 

outbursting of his celestial glory, when at the 
wind-up of human history he comes to raise the 
dead, to judge the world, and to assign to men their 
eternal destinies. In his graphic words there is often 
a foreshortening of the picture : events widely sepa- 
rated appear to mingle into one, the judgment at 
the end of the Jewish age apparently blending into 
the judgment at the end of the Christian age. From 
not noticing the point of transition much confusion 
has arisen. 

It is doubtful whether the early disciples ever 
looked as far forward as the general judgment at 
the end of the world. What they thought about 
and wrote about was the judgment at the end of 
their own age — the judgment which was then 
impending. In their thought the end of their own 
age and *'the end of all things" were one. In their 
later writings, as their vision broadens, they correct 
their early mistake, and refer to a wo rid- judgment 
as something in the remote future. What they 
originally expected has not yet come to pass, 
although well-nigh nineteen centuries have fled; 
what their clearer and larger vision afterward 
brought to them is still part of heaven's future and 
partially disclosed program. 

In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, 
a description is given in two separate acts of the 
judgment of Christ. The first act is the judgment 
of the Lord's "own servants," the Jews, at the end 
of the Jewish age; the other is the judgment of the 
"nations," the Gentiles, at the end of the world. 



UNVEILED 221 

In the one the criterion of judgment is fidelity to 
trust; in the other it is the possession of a spirit 
of benevolence, which ministers unconsciously to 
Christ by ministering to his suffering disciples. The 
Jewish people to whom were committed "the oracles 
of God" were weighed in the balance and found 
wanting. The ax which had been lying against 
the root of the tree of the Jewish theocracy was 
now to be lifted up upon it, and it was to come 
down with a crash. Judgment was to begin at the 
house of God, but it was not to end there. The 
Gentiles too were to have their probation and their 
judgment. The succeeding age was to end in a 
judgment in which the whole world was to be 
involved. At the end of the Christian dispensation 
the rejected Messiah was to come in his kingly 
glory, gathering before him all the nations ; reward- 
ing those among them who ministered to afflicted 
humanity, and accepting the service done by them 
to the least of his brethren as if done to himself; 
punishing those who neglected to minister to others ; 
calling the one class into the unending life of his 
kingdom, dooming the other class to unending sepa- 
ration from the life of his kingdom. 

Too much stress must not, however, be put upon 
such apocalyptic imagery in connection with divine 
judgment as the coming of the Judge "in the clouds 
of heaven," or the turning of the sun into dark- 
ness and the moon into blood. These highly 
wrought figures belong to the region of poetry, and 
are to be interpreted as we interpret similar expres ■ 



222 THE PRESENCE 

sions in the Old Testament. At the same time they 
show that the final stage of God's judgments is 
characterized by visibility. In this lies its power 
of impression. What has long been hidden comes 
to the surface. Regarding the Jewish judgment 
it is said, "Behold, he cometh with the clouds ; and 
every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him ; 
and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him. 
Even so, Amen" (Rev. i. 7). Regarding the final 
judgment it is said, "For the Son of man shall 
come in the glory of his Father with his angels ; 
and then shall he render unto every man according 
to his deeds" (Matt. 16. 27). 

Upon the subject of last things it behooves us 
to speak with dogmatic modesty. There is much 
about it that is shrouded in mystery. There are 
things which no man knoweth, questions of days 
and hours which the Father has kept in his own 
hand. As Saint Augustine has said, "The last / 
day is hidden that every day may be regarded." 
There is also about all judgment days something 
of the nature of a surprise. They come unexpect- 
edly, in a day and hour when we think not. And 
yet they grow out of the past. They constitute a 
crisis which is the end of a process ; they bring into 
view that which is now hidden. Until any age runs 
to its close judgment cannot be finished. The 
harvest of every age is always at the end. The 
Jewish harvest day was at the end of the Jewish 
age; the world's harvest day will be at the end 
of the world. And with it will come the emergence 



UNVEILED 223 

of the world's hidden King, the completion of the 
redemptive process now going on through faith in 
the unseen ; the delivering of all things by the Son 
to the Father, and the transfer of redemption's 
unfinished story from the earthly to the heavenly 
sphere. 

II. In the World to Come 

The complete unveiling of the Presence comes 
on the other side. Death is the unveiling of the 
Presence, heaven is the Presence unveiled. Here 
we follow one 

Whom we now obscurely see 
Through a veil that hangs between. 

There the veil will drop, and we shall see him as 
he is — see him by direct vision, and not by the 
power of sanctified imagination ; see him as we shall 
eternally know him. Paul expresses this change in 
the words, "Now we see in a mirror, darkly; but 
then face to face: now I know in part; but then 
shall I know fully even as also I was fully known" 
(i Cor. 13. 12). 

Never was this hope of seeing Christ more ten- 
derly expressed than by the poet Tennyson, who, 
when musing upon that voyage which all must take, 
voices the wish that there be no sadness of farewell 
when he embarks: 

For tho' from out our bourne of time and place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the bar. 



2 24 THE PRESENCE 

(In the unveiling of the Presence Christian hope 
culminates. There are four texts in which Paul, 
in giving expression to this hope, indicates degrees 
in its development. In the first of these he speaks 
of being drawn in opposite directions, yet as "hav- 
ing the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it 
is very far better." But, checking himself, as if 
this, after all, might be a selfish wish, he adds, "yet 
to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake" 
(Phil. I. 2^, 24). The mind of Paul had evidently 
undergone a change. Twenty-five years before, when 
writing to the Thessalonians, he had looked upon 
the coming of the Lord as imminent ; but now that 
he is "Paul the aged," and is facing martyrdom, he 
does not think of Christ coming to him, but of his 
going to Christ. To be with Christ was the goal 
of his hope; and, inasmuch as death lay between 
him and that goal, he was willing to die. He spoke 
of death as a gain; not only or mainly because 
it is the birth into a higher life, nor because by it 
the garnered experience of the present is carried 
forward into the future, but because it would intro- 
duce him into the instant enjoyment of the Lord's 
presence. To live in the veiled presence of the 
Lord was good; to depart from earth and dwell 
in his unveiled presence was better. Instead, then, 
of relinquishing the hope by which his spiritual life 
had been nourished, he merely pushed the time of 
its fulfillment a little farther forward, transferring 
it from this side to the other side of the river. His 
hope in its essence was undestroyed; it merely 



UNVEILED 225 

changed its form. He believed that death would 
bring him into the immediate presence of his Lord, 
the future manifestations of whose glory he would 
behold, and the future triumphs of whose kingly 
power he would share. 

In the second text, speaking for those who 
expected to be ''caught up in the clouds, to meet 
the Lord in the air," but who were not; and of 
which number he himself was one, he says, *'So 
shall we ever be with the Lord" (i Thess. 4. 17). 
This was Paul's conception of heaven — to pass up 
out of earth's tribulations, and to dwell forever in 
the unclouded light of his Saviour's presence. 

He advances a step farther when he says that 
Christ ''died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, 
we should li^ together with him" (i Thess. 5. 10). 
This union with Christ in living and dying implies 
a togetherness of heart and life, a close and hal- 
lowed fellowship, begun on earth, unbroken by 
death, carried over to the other side, and continu- 
ing forever. 

A still higher point is reached when he draws 
a contrast between "being at home in the body" 
and absent from the Lord, and being absent from 
the body and "ajMhome with the Lord" (2 Cor. 
5. 6-8). What a delightful touch ! "At home with 
the Lord." This means more than being present 
with him, and having fellowship with him ; it means 
finding joy in his society ; it means being at ease in 
his company; it means being with him upon the 
footing of a most intimate friendship. In him 



2 26 THE PRESENCE 

the heart has found its home ; and to be at home 
with him is to be at home in heaven. 

This changed aspect of death and of the future 
Hfe which Paul describes has come in virtue of 
the completion of Christ's redemptive work. When 
the conquering Christ ascended upon high, leading 
captivity captive, death was abolished, Hades 
emptied and closed, and heaven opened. There is 
now no long term of waiting in the gloomy under- 
world; nor is there any tarrying with Christ in 
Paradise — the bright side of Hades. At the mo- 
ment of death the beatific vision breaks upon the 
soul. Sudden death is instant glory. ) The words, 
"Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from 
henceforth,'' imply that a change for the better 
has taken place with respect to death. From hence- 
forth it is a blessed thing to die in the Lord. Since 
Jesus died and rose again, and became the first- 
fruits of them that slept, death is not what it was 
before. It is a vanquished foe, stingless and harm- 
less. 

Jesus lives, henceforth is death 

But the gate of life immortal; 
This shall calm our trembling breath, 

When we pass its gloomy portal. 

Alleluia ! 

It is a privilege inconceivable to be living after the 
resurrection and return of Jesus. Those who live 
in this Christian age enter into the possession of 
all the benefits of his victory over death. Death 
is no longer going into exile; it is going home — 



UNVEILED 227 

going to the Father's house of many mansions 
which Christ has gone to prepare. It is falHng 
asleep on earth and waking in heaven. It is not 
going down to mingle with the clouds of the valley, 
or going out to wander through the pale realms of 
shade, but going up where Christ has gone before 
us; going from the dim and interrupted vision of 
his presence into the light of the eternal glory which 
shines from his face. 

Nor does the dying Christian fare forth alone. 
He is met at the door of exit by the Master him- 
self, who has said, *'If I go and prepare a place 
for you, I come again, and will receive you unto 
myself; that where I am, there ye may be also" 
(John 14. 3)., With this text probably in mind Dr. 
Borden P. Bowne, of Boston University, closed 
his lecture to his class in metaphysics the day before 
he died with these words: "There is some place 
to go to and Some One to go with." Those who 
speak of the loneliness of death have not taken to 
their hearts the comforting thought suggested by the 
Master's words, that the soul at its exit from the 
body enters upon a personally conducted journey. 
To the dying Christian it is a familiar face that 
draws near as his spirit is making its final stage 
in life's pilgrimage ; it is a familiar voice that whis- 
pers in his ear, 'Tear thou not, for I am with thee," 
when all the sounds of earth melt away; it is a 
familiar hand that is outstretched to welcome him 
when the world recedes and disappears, and he is 
ushered into a new realm. 



22$ THE PRESENCE 

O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever; a Hand like this 

hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the 

Christ stand ! 

Sometimes the unveiling comes suddenly; and 
the unfluttered Christian awaits it in quiet confi- 
dence, saying with bated breath: 

*Tn my soul one hope forever sings. 
That at the next white corner of the road 
My eyes shall look on Him." 

But oftener the unveiling is gradual. That the 
transition may not be too sudden the veil is partially 
lifted before death seals the eyes, and the dying 
saint exclaims: 

"I hear a voice you cannot hear, 
Which says I must not stay; 
I see a hand you cannot see 
Which 'beckons me away." 

— Tickell. 

It is said that Jonathan Edwards's last words, after 
bidding his relatives good-by, were, "Now, where 
is Jesus of Nazareth, my true and never-failing 
Friend?" — and, so saying, he fell asleep. 

Who shall dare to say that the dying Christian 
is deluded when, with the light of heaven in his 
eyes, he declares that he has seen the Lord ? When 
the silver cord is loosening, the two worlds mingle 
into one, and the dying Christian is partly in heaven 
before he is altogether out of earth. As the things 
of the world recede the things of heaven draw near. 



UNVEILED 2^9 

A sphere is entered into which earthly friends can- 
not follow. And what more natural than at this 
point of separation there should come to the depart- 
ing soul a vision of the glorified Redeemer, such as 
was given to John in Patmos? The unaccountable 
thing would be that Christ should not come to 
receive his own unto himself. 

A familiar instance of the manifestation of Christ 
to a dying saint is found in the case of Stephen, the 
first Christian martyr. It is recorded that "he, 
being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up stedfastly 
into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus 
standing on the right hand of God" (Acts 7. 55). 
But think of the crass literalism that, sacrificing 
the spirit for the letter, attempts to draw from 
these words an argument for the absence of Christ. 
Stephen saw Jesus in heaven at God's right hand. 
Where is heaven? Where is the right hand of God? 
In some distant star, or in some spiritual sphere 
which touches closely upon earth? One thing is 
clear, from the council chamber where Stephen 
stood, heaven's open gate was not far distant. So 
near was heaven to earth, and so near was the 
glorified Christ to his suffering servant, that 
immediately after Stephen was able to commit his 
departing spirit into his hands. As the stones 
thrown by his murderers fell upon the martyr like 
a shower of hail, muttering the prayer, "Lord, 
receive my spirit," he fell asleep in the arms of 
eternal Love. A moment after and he was with 
his Lord in glory. 



230 THE PRESENCE 

Our friends who have fallen asleep in Jesus hav^ 
not gone to be tenants of the tomb ; they have gon^ 
to be with Christ, and are now in his keeping. The 
new life which they have attained is one of unend- 
ing and unclouded fellowship with their exalted 
Lord. Because he lives they live. Why, thenj 
should we go to the grave to seek them there? 
Why seek the living among the dead? The place 
to find the living is among the living. 

There is no friend of mine 

Laid in the grave to sleep; 
No grave, or green, or heaped afresh 

By which I stand and weep. 

Who died! What means that word, 

Of man so much abhorred? 
Caught up in clouds of heaven, to be 

For ever with the Lord. 

Thank God ! for all my loved ^ 

That out of pain and care 
Have safely reached the heavenly heights. 

And stay to meet me there. 

In a touching poem entitled "Christus Consolator" 
Rossiter W. Raymond advances the thought that 
if our departed loved ones are with Christ, and if 
Christ is here, they are here together: 

Beside the dead I knelt in prayer 

And felt a presence as I prayed: 
Lo! it was Jesus standing there, 

He smiled, "Be not afraid." 



UNVEILED 231 

Lord, thou hast conquered death we know; 

Restore again to life, I said, 
This one who died an hour ago, 

He smiled, "She is not dead." 

Asleep then, as thyself didst say, 
Yet thou canst lift the lids that keep 

Her prisoned eyes from ours away. 
He smiled, "She doth not sleep." 

Nay, then, though haply she do wake 
And look upon some fairer dawn, 

Restore her to our hearts that ache, 
He smiled, "She is not gone." 

Alas, too well we know our loss. 

Nor hope again our joy to touch. 
Until the stream of death we cross. 

He smiled, "There is no such." 

Yet our beloved seem so far ; 

The while we yearn to have them near, 
Albeit with thee we trust they are. 

He smiled, "And I am here." 

Dear Lord, how shall we know that they 
Still walk unseen with us and thee, 

Nor sleep nor wander far away? 
He smiled, "Abide in me." 

The eternal reunion with our sainted dead is 
implied in our eternal reunion with Christ. To be 
with him is to be with those who die in him. 
Hence the desire to be with Christ, carrying with 
it, as it does, the gratification of our social instincts, 
is a very natural one, and one that grows with the 



232 THE PRESENCE 

passing years; and equally natural is the conflict 
which Paul experienced between the desire to be 
with him and the desire to continue at the earthly 
task which he has appointed. 

Since the days of Paul successive generations 
of Christians have shared with him in his later and 
riper experience. But some have harked back to 
his earlier experience, and have looked for the Lord 
to come in some outward and visible form; but one 
by one they have departed to be with him; and 
there is every reason to believe that in that way 
the present and future followers of that forlorn 
hope will go. Yet, what matters it how the goal 
is reached, so that it is reached? What matters it 
whether Christ come to us, or we go to him, so that 
we and he are joined together forever? And, after 
all, the great thing is to be ready to meet him 
whatever may be the way in which the meeting 
shall take place. An austere friend once found 
Saint Francis of Sales playing a game of chess, 
and asked, reproachfully, "What if it were revealed 
to you that the Lord will presently return?" *'I 
would finish the game," answered Saint Francis ; 
*'it was for his glory that I began it." This is the 
true attitude to maintain — to live from day to day, 
in work and play, so that when the curtain drops 
we may not be ashamed before Him at his appear- 
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